Trees planted to offset Fleet and Mobility Live visitor emissions

The vehicle emissions of visitors travelling to this year’s Fleet & Mobility Live have been offset thanks to Lightfoot in partnership with Fleet News.

Almost 50 trees will be planted to offset around 35,000 kgs of CO2 emissions created by the journeys of more than 2,100 delegates.

Visitors to Fleet & Mobility Live, which took place at the NEC from October 8-9, were asked to fill in details of how they travelled to and from the show and the distance of their journey.

This information allowed Lightfoot to analyse the carbon footprint of journeys by electric, petrol and diesel vehicles, as well as by train, and calculate the total emissions for visitors.

The data provided showed that 29% travelled by petrol car, 19% each by train, diesel and full electric, and 14% in a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV).

In total, an estimated 34,506kg of CO2 was produced by visitors’ travel.

Using Lightfoot’s sustainability project, set up with carbon offset company Evertreen, those 49 trees, each offsetting around 700kg each, will be planted in Kimony, Madagascar.

“We create this type of analysis, reporting and offsetting for many of our fleet clients, and so it seemed a natural fit to partner with Fleet & Mobility Live, which has such a major focus on decarbonisation, to make visiting the show as sustainable as possible,” said Lightfoot managing director, Paul Hollick.

“We are very grateful to all those visitors who filled in their journey details to allow us to model the overall emissions of everybody who attended.”

Fleet & Mobility Live, which is organised by Fleet News, is the UK's leading annual event for the fleet and mobility community.

Key speakers offered expert advice and shared best practice for running safe and compliant car and van fleets in a packed schedule of panel discussions and presentations in three main theatre areas.

The free-to-attend two-day event, sponsored by Octopus Electroverse for Business, also offered delegates the opportunity to meet a host of top suppliers and network with peers.

Show highlights were many and included hearing from Abdul Chowdhury, head of vehicle policy, Office For Zero Emission Vehicles  (OZEV) on the Government's roadmap to decarbonisation and the implications for car, van and truck fleets. 

Visitors also heard from executives from the UK's leading leasing companies engaged in an open forum for fleet decision-makers, discussing future trends, current challenges, and new initiatives.

Chris Lester, events director at Fleet & Mobility Live, said: “We are always looking at ways of ensuring our events are produced as sustainably as possible, and so we are really pleased to be working with Lightfoot to offset the emissions of our visitors.

“It’s one of many elements that helped make this year’s Fleet and Mobility Live a massive success.”