Since 2006, Mobility customers and employees have driven a total of 147 million climate-neutral kilometres in their vehicles. 33,700 Mobility customers were on the go climate-neutrally by the end of 2015 with the Mobility fleet (2.1% more than the previous year), which is almost a third of all Mobility customers.
As thanks for ten years of working together successfully, René Estermann – managing director of myclimate – and Vidya Sagar Devabhaktuni – director of the Indian organisation SKG Sangha, which builds biogas plants using the compensation payments – presented Viviana Buchmann, departing managing director of Mobility, with a certificate celebrating the 10,000th biogas plant that has gone into operation in India.
Viviana Buchmann remembers why Mobility was one of the first big customers that decided to collaborate with myclimate in 2006, “At that time, there were already discussions in politics, the economy and society about climate goals and how they were to be reached. In the meantime, Mobility has professed to supporting social, economic and ecological sustainability and is an environmentally friendly, economical alternative to owning a private car. Consequently, we decided early on to make CO₂-neutral journeys possible for our customers.”
Upon the request of Mobility, half of the money from the compensation is invested in Swiss climate protection projects and the other half in international ones, such as the biogas plants in India (Project 1, project 2). Each plant saves about five tonnes of CO₂ every year. Most of all, the small-scale farming families in those areas enjoy an improved standard of living: women and girls no longer need to spend hours looking for firewood, and cooking with biogas is quick and clean. High-quality fertiliser, a by-product of the biogas plants that operate using cow manure, improves harvests and replaces harmful and expensive chemical fertilisers.
For René Estermann, the collaboration with Mobility is serendipity since it optimally reflects the philosophy of myclimate – “avoid, reduce and compensate”: “Mobility customers share a car instead of having their own. Mobility makes sure the car fleet is energy-efficient, and myclimate makes sure the emissions that cannot be avoided are compensated through a climate protection project.”
For Hans Peter Leutwiler, who had already used “Sharecom”, the predecessor of Mobility, driving climate-neutrally is self-evident: “Since it is impossible to connect a petrol-powered car to green energy, it was obvious I would pay this small surcharge for climate neutrality. By doing so, the car sharers approached climate neutrality: as environmentally friendly, socially responsible and affordable as possible.”
Win climate-neutral overnight stays
It’s easy to enter the contest. Mobility customers who are not on the go climate-neutrally yet, can sign up for CO₂ compensation at mobility.ch and automatically be entered into the drawing. The deadline for entry is 30 September 2016.