Children's Champs is carbon neutral
CHILDREN'S Champions is the first major set of awards in Britain to go carbon neutral.
These are truly the Green Awards - giving youngsters the best future we can: a Planet Earth that's just a little healthier to grow up in.
But first, exactly what does 'going carbon neutral' mean?
Virtually everything we do produces some CO2 because we depend so heavily on power that comes from gas, oil or coal - these are what are called the fossil fuels.
From flicking on a light switch to putting on the central heating or getting in a car - so many of our actions in some way produce a little, or a lot, of CO2.
This is one of the 'greenhouse gasses' - so called because it wraps our planet in an invisible covering so dense that our whole world heats up. To make Children's Champions carbon neutral we need to remove as much CO2 from the planet as we use. And to succeed, we have to do three things:
First, we have to make sure that we at the News of the World are being as energy efficient and using as little CO2 as possible.
Second, we needed to do all we could to make sure those we work with in Children's Champions are also doing their bit towards a greener environment.
And third, we have to accept that, for the time being, there will be some areas in which we, or those we work with on our Awards, unavoidably produce some CO2 emissions.
So we've offset those by contributing to green initiatives elsewhere that will help reduce the planet's reliance on fossil fuels in the future.
That way we should be able to balance what we've used with what we help save - and that's what makes us carbon neutral. This is easy to say, but less easy to do.
What we've done so far
NEWS OF THE WORLD
We're part of News International (along with The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times).
News International went carbon neutral in January 2008 - the first major newspaper group in the UK to do so.
To achieve this, we do a great many technical things including, for example, making sure that our new presses at Broxbourne are 20% more efficient than those they replaced at Wapping.
Old presses that are replaced are resold to other publishers, extending their lives, or scrapped down and all possible parts are recycled.
We've even installed electric charge points for employees' vehicles – to encourage a switch to electric vehicles for those of us who need to drive to our Wapping site (and, before you ask, we get 70% of our electricity from renewable sources and the rest from Combined Heat and Power sources.)
But what most people want to know is: how can a company that needs wood for paper possibly look after our forest - one of our greatest resources for saving the planet.
Well, 85% of the paper we use - the newsprint - is recycled.
And 100% of the wood used by our Scandinavian and European suppliers originates from sustainably managed forests.
In Europe, for example, for every tree that is felled to make paper another THREE are planted.
This means that every year the forested area of Europe expands by 5,800 square kilometers thanks to the replanting by the paper manufacturers.
TELEVISION
Twenty years after their launch in 1989, Sky are investing around £233m over four years on the construction and technical fit out of Europe’s most sustainable broadcast facilities, set to enter service in 2011 at their headquarters in Osterley, West London.
Wind turbines will provide 90% of the energy for office lighting (subject to further planning permission). and there'll even be rainwater harvesting to irrigate green spaces and to flush all toilets in the building
But more than that, they're also helping customers reduce their energy bills.
In 2006, Sky launched the world’s first auto-standby for set top boxes, downloading it to four million boxes.
By switching inactive boxes to standby overnight, Sky’s Auto Standby (SAS) helps their customers to reduce their carbon footprint and save money on their energy bills.
To extend that idea, Sky has been upgrading the software so that it switches inactive boxes to standby during the day as well as overnight, and downloading the new 24/7 SAS to EVERY box with an active subscription in all nine million Sky customer homes.
24/7 SAS is expected to save customers an estimated total each year of £20m on their energy bills and 90,000 tonnes of CO2.
And there's more!
The production company that we and Sky used to film our Gala Awards is Leeds-based Daisybeck TV.
To make sure that we didn't expend unneccessary energy with long journeys, we gave Daisybeck staff space within the News of the World's offices for the duration of their work on Children's Champions so that they could take advantage of our own carbon-neutral environment.
OUR TRANSPORT
OK, we can't go everywhere on foot and as soon as we take any form of motorised transport we start emitting CO2.
So we have to do as much as we can - and we've been working with GREENTOMATOCARS - a London car company that uses only Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles which are far, far cleaner than ordinary motors.
In fact, greentomatocars (yes, it really is all one word) is the nation's first 'carbon negative' private hire/taxi firm. That means they take MORE CO2 out of circulation than they use.
From their launch in 2006 their use of the Prius has saved 1,000 tonnes of CO2 that would have been emitted if passengers had opted for ordinary taxis instead.
But it doesn't stop under the bonnet. Drivers are trained to “plot where they drop” to avoid having to drive back on themselves to pick up the next passenger from near to the previous drop off.
And they're just about the only company we know who turn down journeys that aren't 'green'.
So, for example, they might recommend that a customer uses a local service rather than send one of their cars a long way out of the area to perform a relatively short journey.
They also suggest that passengers share a car where they're looking to book multiple cars for what is essentially the same journey. Drivers are also regularly assessed to make sure their driving techniques are also the most environmentally friendly possible.
It's not for nothing that they won the Energy Saving Trust Fleet Hero Award for Industry Leadership in 2008 and Green Fleet (UK) Innovation Award in 2007.
OUR HOTELS
Children's Champions winners - and some of our celeb presenters - stayed at the palatial Marriott County Hall Hotel overlooking Parliament and the Thames.
It's just a stone's throw from Downing Street where we'll have tea with the Prime Minister. In the night, our gala awards ceremony will be held at the Grosvenor House hotel on London's Park Lane.
This too is part of the Marriott Group and shares the parent company's drive to be green and ultimately carbon neutral.
The centrepiece of Marriott International’s long-term environmental strategy is helping protect 1.4 million acres of endangered rainforest in the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil.
Clearing forests causes more carbon emissions than all the world’s cars, trains and trucks put together.
Back at home, Marriott is developing a range of other initiatives including replacing Styrofoam and plastic utensils with those made out of 'SpudWare' (yes, you guessed it, the stuff is made out of potato, plus sugarcane and starch, and is all fully biodegradable within an average of 100 days.
Virtually all their hotels also pursue local initiatives. Every year at Marriott County Hall, for example, the staff - everyone from General Manager Stuart Bowery down - get into overalls and wellies and trudge through the muddy banks of the Thames at low tide picking up sunken litter.
That's everything from shopping trolleys to credit cards and loads of bottles. Every bit helps make the Thames cleaner.
OUR PARTNER 
The Post Office are the generous sponsors of this year's Children's Champions Awards.
They are part of the Royal Mail Group, along with the Royal Mail itself and Parcelforce Worldwide.
Their plan is to be carbon neutral across the whole group by 2015 - but they're already making significant strides in that direction.
Their targets for next year, for example, include slashing the greenhouse gas emissions from their transport by 20% from 2004-5 levels and reducing those same emissions from the energy they use in their buildings by 10% from 2004-5 levels
By 2012 they aim for all their transport in London - a huge fleet of vehicles - to be carbon neutral.
At the same time they plan to have their entire Scottish operation carbon neutral. And, as we say, by 2015 the whole group plans to be carbon neutral.
But Children's Champions is about going the extra mile - and that''s exactly what they aim to do.
The Royal Mail Group spends around £2 billion a year on roughly 1,000 contracted suppliers.
That means they have a fair bit of leverage in the marketplace - influence they can use to encourage others to improve their own sustainability.
So, for example, by 2015 they'll also assess and contract ALL their suppliers using environmental and ethical criteria.
As you can see, in some areas Children's Champions is already carbon neutral, in other areas we're well on the way.
But we recognise that's not enough, so that's why we'll be buying 'carbon offsets' for the energy use we can't currently neutralise - and that way we will end up as the truly Green Awards.
