Carbon Neutral Public Service
The Carbon Neutral Public Service programme
The Carbon Neutral Public Service programme aims to demonstrate government leadership on sustainability by reducing government's environmental impact.
It will do this by making the 34 core public service agencies carbon neutral. It will make sure the six lead agencies are carbon neutral by 2012 with the remaining 28 agencies being on the path to carbon neutrality by 2012.
The programme involves a three-step process:
- Measuring the greenhouse gas emissions from each agency's activities;
- Reducing those emissions; and
- Offsetting the remaining emissions by undertaking projects to remove an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or prevent it being released.
All 34 government agencies will complete an annual emmissions inventory, develop an emissions reduction plan for their organisation and undertake the activities in their plans. The programme will use New Zealand based projects to offset the greenhouse gas emissions that cannot be avoided after emissions reduction activities have taken place.
Our emissions inventory and reduction plan
The Ministry of Economic Development is one of the six lead government agencies taking part in the Carbon Neutral Public Service programme.
You can find our emissions inventory and reduction plan for 2006/2007 below. These reports have been verified by the Ministry for the Environment, which runs this programme.
Highlights from our emissions inventory and reduction plan include:
- A reduction in energy consumption over the 2006/2007 financial year by 11%.
- Our recycling scheme, which was implemented in all of the Ministry's premises across New Zealand and has seen a reduction in waste sent to the landfill by 65% (down from 69kgs per person to 24kgs per person).
- We aim to further reduce landfill waste for all our offices to 15kgs per person by June 2008.
- We aim to further reduce our overall energy consumption by 10% and set specific energy standards following an energy audit.
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