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Mitchells of Mansfield is aiming to make Nottinghamshire the greenest freight distributing county in the UK by offering its customers the ability to offset their freight carbon emissions.

The family-run haulage business, based in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, has teamed up with carbon offsetting organisation Ecologi to create Mitchells' CO2 Carbon Co-Op.

Each Mitchell’s customer that signs up to its Carbon Co-op at https://ecologi.com/mitchellsco2carbonco gets its own virtual forest showing how Mitchells has offset its customer's delivery mileage.

Customers will be set up on the scheme by Ecologi with their own page linked though to Mitchells Co-Op so they can publish information on their CO2 emissions to their clients.

Mitchells will add the carbon cost of the journey to the cost of the transport. This information, including the kilometres covered, will be submitted to Ecologi, which posts it to the Co-op companies' individual accounts with the offset charge applied per consignment and the number of trees planted calculated per pallet.

Currently, Mitchells is offering this as a voluntary service, but wants to make it a default part of its service by next year.

As part of the promotion every Mitchells customer that signs up to the scheme will also be gifted 250 trees to their virtual forest.

Mitchells will also offer customers the ability to choose where their money is spent, in either renewables, nature based projects or community schemes.

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Mitchells MD Richard Montgomery (pictured) said he is taking action on behalf of his daughter and future generations.

He said: "It has become further apparent to me over the past few weeks of watching the news that the impact of greenhouse gases is having a devasting impact on our planet and even quicker than scientists predicted.”

Whilst the company has already been carbon assessed and plans to become a Carbon Zero Business by 2027, Montgomery said he wanted to do more.

He explained: “We want to take the lead in offering our customers the ability to responsibly and legitimately transport their freight through us and offset the CO2 emissions as they go. Effectively creating a zero carbon delivery.

“This would make us the only pallet company in Nottingham and maybe the UK that would offer this service. And whilst we may not see an immediate pick up by all our customers I think that within 12 months the majority of the customers will want this option.”

Mitchells’ customers will be able to show clients their deliveries are carbon zero through the offsetting projects and can choose to absorb the cost or pass it on at the delivery cost point of sale.

“I would like to get to the point where we plant a tree for every pallet they send,” Montgomery said.
“As a huge consumer of wood it would make sense we give something back for the next generations. It wouldn’t take long for customers to see the real impact they are making.”

Michells has been allied to Ecologi for sometime and so far the company has offset 207.5 tonnes of its own carbon emissions by planting 709 trees via offsetting schemes based in the UK, as well as in Africa and South America.

For more stories tracking the industry journey to decarbonisation see our new Freight Carbon Zero website.

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