We're not eco warriors,
but we clean up after ourselves
We’re a lot like you.
Like most people in the UK today, we sometimes take flights, buy the latest gadgets, drive cars, and heat our homes…
But when we all do this, it comes at a cost. Not just to our wallet, but to the environment.
That cost is our carbon footprint. We’ve all got one. And, even though we probably have no idea what it is – it’s usually higher than we think.
Help to stop climate change.
Your carbon footprint can be cleaned up. This is called ‘carbon offsetting’ and it’s what we take care of for you.
First we help you work out how big your carbon footprint is and then your subscription goes to funding cutting edge clean-energy projects like biomass, wind, solar and hydro power.
And as a bonus we also plant trees for you. While the trees don’t count towards cleaning up your carbon footprint, they do count towards a bunch of other benefits the planet badly needs right now.
But this is about people too.
There’s more to your subscription than climate change and the environment. It helps people as well. The projects we support that offset your carbon footprint also create jobs.
Planting trees and operating the likes of wind and solar farms and hydroelectric power stations requires skilled workers. Thousands of them.
Nine times out of ten these workers are people who badly need this type of work because they come from developing regions where skilled employment is scarce.
And none of it would be possible without the spending on the projects by the likes of our members.
They give work, hope and happiness to thousands.
And we couldn’t be prouder.
Our goals by 2023
That breaks down into:
10,500
co2 tonnes offset
500,000
trees planted
6,000
members
If you like what we’re trying to do, then get involved. Become a member and you can help us get there.
We’re a group of friends who got together one day and started talking.
We talked about climate change. The raging wildfires. The ice caps melting. The crop failures.
It turned out we all felt the same – pretty helpless. Making small changes to our lives felt like the right thing to do, but it didn’t seem enough.
We created Alter Eco to help people like us. Cleaning up our carbon footprints might not save the world on it’s own, but we think it’s a bloody good place to start.
Why we started Alter Eco
Emilio
Emilio grew up in Mexico and wants to save the natural world he knows and loves. In Alter Eco, he looks after digital marketing growth.
Andy
After realising how urgent the crisis is, he wants to keep the world safe for his nephews. In Alter Eco, he looks after sales & partnerships.
Joe
An Attenborough disciple, Joe wants everyone to understand how they can make a difference. In Alter Eco, he looks after content.
Want to join us?
FAQs
If it’s done properly, yes.
There’s rightly a lot of concern about whether projects would be happening even without additional funding by people who specifically want to offset their carbon footprint.
Projects also need to lock away carbon for good, otherwise it’s just delaying the inevitable (and that’s not good enough).
Making a real difference means supporting new projects that wouldn’t have happened otherwise and getting guarantees that it’s going to have permanent impact.
We only support projects that are independently verified by Gold Standard and the United Nations who guarantee these sort of accreditations. Both of these highly-trusted institutions give our members the peace of mind that the projects they choose have been highly scrutinised and proven to be making a real difference to the world.
However, in addition to protecting the planet, we also do our best to ensure the projects we partner with are also doing amazing things for people who haven’t got the best chances in life.
We only take our data from world-leading, reputable sources like the World Bank and Our World in Data.
To make things as simple as possible for you, we use their data on the average British person’s carbon footprint as our benchmark for our ‘Leader’ subscription plan. This is around 8 tonnes of CO2e per year.
We know that there are many good reasons why some people may only want to offset a smaller part of their footprint, whether that’s based on affordability, their lifestyle, or anything else. The ‘Starter’ plan offsets around half of an average footprint.
We also know there are those amazing people who want to have an even bigger impact on climate change, so the ‘Pioneer’ plan offsets two footprints.
All you have to do is pick the subscription plan which works for you, and we do the rest.
We love trees, and planting them is a great thing to do. They work wonders for the environment.
We plant trees with each of our three subscription plans and we only partner with the world-renowned Eden Reforestation Projects.
But while trees are great, climate scientists prefer to keep them out of carbon reduction targets because it’s tricky to measure exactly how much carbon they offset in their lifetime.
That’s why we plant trees as an additional bonus for you and the planet, but they don’t count towards offsetting your carbon footprint. That’s what the other projects we partner with are for.
We support projects that are most effective in making a real difference to climate change, and people.
They are all over the world and we think that’s a great thing, after all climate change is a global problem. We also only support projects that make a difference to the communities around them, so often these are based in places where poverty and access to clean energy can be a real challenge for people.
We will be expanding the projects we support over time, so if you like to make any suggestions then we’d love to hear from you at hello@alter-eco.uk
Let’s put this (incredibly) simply.
Human beings are causing the world to become hotter by releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. And the hotter the world becomes the more uninhabitable it becomes. Until eventually it won’t be habitable at all. For humans. Wildlife. Trees. Plants. Every living thing.
The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998. 9 of those 10 have all occurred since 2005. 2016 and 2020 are the two hottest. Ever.
This has to change. We have to stop the world getting warmer. And fast. In 2016 the Paris Agreement saw governments from 195 countries commit to limiting this global rise in temperature to 1.5℃. That’s the magic number. And the way to achieve this is by reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses entering the atmosphere. Ideally to 0.
But this isn’t just down to governments. You have a part to play too. Everyone does.
The more people like you who reduce their carbon footprint, the more likely we are to avoid climate disasters like extinction, forest fires, heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, water shortages…
There’s no time to lose.
Yes, but we’re about so much more than just offsetting a single flight.
With us, you offset your life, including the flights you take.
Our Medium and Large packages easily clean up enough carbon to include a few flights a year.
But, obviously, best keep them to a minimum if you can.
Airports are rubbish anyway.
We’re Andy, Emilio and Joe.
We’re not “eco-warriors”, we’re just (somewhat) normal people who first met working at the same company together.
We started Alter Eco because we care about the state of the world we live in and we want to create a really easy way for people to clean up their carbon footprint and learn how to live more sustainably without having to give up everything they enjoy in life.
Nope. All of your subscription goes to one of two things.
The first is the incredible projects that are helping to take on climate change.
The second is helping to spread the word.
We’re really ambitious about what we can achieve together.
But we need a lot of people to do their bit in order to make a big difference to climate change. The more members we have the bigger the difference we’ll make to climate change.
The best way we can achieve that is by reinvesting our profits back into things like advertising, marketing and customer care.
No, you’re free to do what you like, any old time.
If you’re a bit skint, or you’re deciding to put your money elsewhere, we’re not going to make a big deal out of it.
Just email hello@alter-eco.uk and let us know.
