Thirteen partners with Forest Carbon to create County Durham woodland

The 23,625 trees planted over 10 hectares, at Jon’s Wood in Crook, near County Durham, are set to capture over 7,200 tonnes of CO2 over their lifetime, as well as providing significant biodiversity benefits.

Thirteen has purchased 10% of the carbon credits generated by the new woodland, which represents 10% of its carbon footprint for the last year.

The project is quality assured under the Forestry Commission’s Woodland Carbon Code, meaning carbon buyers can be sure their contributions were critical to the project proceeding, and that the woodland is properly designed and managed for the long term.

Trees are an effective natural way of helping to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. As they grow, they turn CO2 into solid carbon stored in their trunks and roots, also helping to increase biodiversity to support and protect the natural habitats of birds, bees and insects.

A carbon credit represents either the permanent removal of a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere, or the avoidance of one tonne of CO2 being emitted in the first place, through changes in land use or energy generation.

By partnering with Forest Carbon, Thirteen has become a part of the Northern Carbon Partnership, a collaborative project to calculate, report and mitigate the organisation’s carbon footprint through local woodland creation, in turn gaining level 3 of the SmartCarbon programme in recognition of the action that has been taken.

Thirteen’s head of environmental sustainability Samantha Granger added: “As part of our environmental strategy, we have set clear targets to reduce our negative environmental impacts and we’re using the SmartCarbon calculator to monitor our emissions.

“We launched our Take Control campaign last year and set our ambition to reach net zero carbon by 2035 on our direct business emissions and we’ve made some significant changes already to help us achieve this.

“From looking at cleaner sources of energy, installing renewable energy on our office buildings to exploring how we can use lower carbon renewable technologies at a number of pilot schemes, as we move towards our goal of being carbon neutral in the future.

“Our customers are our priority and we’re continuing to look at how we add value through initiatives to reduce their energy costs and improve the areas where they live, through community and educations projects which will have a lasting positive impact on the environment.”

Director of Forest Carbon, Stephen Prior said: "New UK woodlands play an important role – not only providing long term CO2 capture but also a wide range of other benefits to wider society. They also offer businesses the opportunity to invest locally in respect of their carbon footprints.”

Forest Carbon has created over 200 new woodlands around the UK since 2006, planting 10.5 million trees, through its partners’ projects, which will remove over 2,000,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.