Carbon Negative

Our Carbon Partnership:

The majority of our clients consider future generations when assessing the impact of our investment activities. As part of our commitment to continuously improving the financial lives of the families we work with, we’ve realized that we must consider the environmental impact of our business activities on our community as a whole. We’ve decided to partner with One Tree Planted to ensure that Osbon Capital is a carbon negative business. This partnership aims to offset the environmental impact of our normal business activities.

Offset:

Since nearly everything we do at Osbon Capital Management is technology-oriented, we use kWh for energy consumption as our main variable (kWh=killowatt hour). As we mention in our Assumptions section, we assume that 1 kWh is equal to 1 lb of carbon. Carbon offset is our main objective, so we eventually covert all units to lbs of carbon. We have an analyst update the calculations on a quarterly basis.

Methodology – Three Areas of Carbon Emissions:

Our environmental impact report focuses on three areas: carbon from annual consumable office supplies + carbon of annual transportation + carbon from technology use = total carbon emissions per year in lbs.

Table of Assumptions:

  • Laptop Usage = 75 kWh/yr
  • Monitors = 50 kWh/yr
  • Smartphones = 2.5 kWh/yr
  • Printers = 10 kWh/yr
  • Lighting = 250 kWh/yr
  • 1kWh = 1 lb of Carbon
  • 1 Ream of Paper = 15 lbs of carbon
  • Car Transportation = .7 lb of Carbon / mile
  • 1 Mid-Distance Flight = 660 lbs of carbon
  • 1 Tree Planted = -45lbs/yr carbon
  • Tree Maturity = 25 years

Compounding Effect:

Even the smallest changes can make a huge impact when multiplied year over year, or decade over decade. We are not a large plastics manufacturer or factory, but that doesn’t mean we have zero impact. Since we plan to be in business for decades, we plan for our positive environmental effect to grow exponentially, compounding over time.

25 Times:

We assume that a healthy average tree can sequester about 45 lbs of carbon per year. We also assume that due to the growth lag, we have to significantly overestimate the number of trees that will be needed. Therefore we are planting 25 times the number of trees needed to offset our estimated carbon footprint. This 25x margin helps ensure that we do our part with a healthy margin of safety.

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