Polygon UR Team Takes First Steps to CO2 Neutral Season at Testing Camp in Portugal
P: Hoshi Yoshida
PRESS RELEASE: Polygon UR Team
Our first team trip happened last month in Lousã Portugal. We were there to test some suspension and get a feel for the Portuguese dirt. This was also our first chance to set the table for our CO2 neutral goal for 2020. Following our previous press release, here’s what we were able to do as our first steps with our new goal.
P: Hoshi Yoshida
P: Hoshi Yoshida
No plastic water bottles were harmed during this trip
 | We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on our plan to neutralize our CO2 for 2020 so we decided to start earlier and apply this to our Portugal team camp last month. We bought a reusable 10L water tank to refill all our CamelBak bottles from riders and staff. That saves us from buying one single use plastic water bottle for the whole week, and on top of being greener it’s also easier on the shopping side. |
We avoided plastic as much as possible by bringing our own shopping bags and by buying food that is not over-packaged. Our accommodation and guide Wheelers MTB Holidays, was well equipped with recycling so that we could at least recycle the packaging we could not avoid.
Flexitarian
We varied our diet and had 4 days with plant based meals and 3 days with meat. When eating animal products, we prioritize organic products as well as meat with a smaller footprint like chicken.
Did you know that 1kg of beef is the equivalent of driving your car for 63 miles?
Everybody enjoyed trying new things and this red curry recipe was definitely a favorite of the crew.
| A normal week for our team on a camp would include a carnivorous diet for at least two meals per day. We went to Portugal earlier this month and as a group decided that we would eat more plant-based for the week. |
We got teleported in Lousã
We wish this could be possible, but we still had to fly from different parts of the world to meet down in Lousã. However, we got as many people as possible on direct flights to reduce the emissions. To offset the remaining ones, we have partnered with Climate Care. Over the season, every trip will be entered in a spreadsheet that calculates the amount of CO2 that was generated.
For this team camp in Portugal, the total emissions included everyone’s flight as well as the driving mileage (to and from the airport, shuttling in Lousã, etc.). It came up to 9.55 tonnes of CO2 which means we had to pay 124.74$ CAD to Climate Care to offset through a portfolio they put together. This portfolio is specifically made for individuals or small businesses who want to offset their emissions, but don’t generate enough to make the credits viable for most projects.
Here’s one of the four projects included in that portfolio:
Was our test camp still productive? Yes
Was it hard? No
This showed us how keeping our CO2 neutral goal in sight isn’t so hard.
We promise we are not always gonna talk about it all the time, we will just keep you updated on solutions we find and the progress we make from time to time.
Next time you will hear us it will probably be for some riding actions!
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Good one PB readers, good one...
People can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that small changes can make a big difference when everyone practices them.
Obviously we as a race aren't going to undo all of the damage, but if everyone is a bit more conscious about their impact, it will make a difference. These comments make me lose a bit more faith in humanity every day...
Apparently we should have stuck to magazines and topo maps.
Or are you saying that you don't believe that green house gas emissions have a negative impact on the planet?
I commend Polygon for realizing their impact and trying to push others to become conscious of their own impacts so that they can hopefully make small changes too.
Some may view it as shoving environmentalism down their throat but everyone else sees it as spreading knowledge and trying to have a positive impact.
Take plastic bottles for instance, there is absolutely no reason that anyone not in an emergency situation should need bottled water, yet it seems like everyone still uses it out of convenience.
If influental companies and people don't promote sustainable behavior then who will?
Who cares, nowadays nobody thinks on a real green house. But i prefer not to say green house anyway. When we talk about gases in the atmosphere which have to do with earth temperature everyone knows the steam is the most important one. The reflection of CO2 is not the big deal compared to the steam. But to not make only black and white statements, i just would say that i do not believe the weather models. I believe that clima predictions are not possible and that reducing CO2 is having no better effect for us. Weather and clima is so complicated. I believe not the mainstream, i believe that it would be maybe better when we had a middle earth temperature that is a little bit higher than now. In history we had sections with higher temperatures and it seems to be good for the humans (a population grows in warm regions more than in cold regions). Same with CO2, the more you have in the atmosphere, the greener the planet. A C4-Plant can use CO2 and light more efficient like a C3 Plant, so not all plants would benefit from more CO2.
Important to know is also that some experts say when you double the CO2 in the atmosphere you do not have a linear uv reflection effect. The first ppm of CO2 are way more important, they have the biggest reflection and more CO2 doesn't change very much. The reflection is only in a few parts of the spectrum, so the rest of the spectrum does not reflect any uv at all, no matter how much of CO2 you have. Steam is here much more important with a very, very wide reflection spectrum compared to CO2.
I have no deeper knowledge, but this is what i maybe believe today. It's more a feeling than knowledge. When you dig deeper you are confronted with so many things, it's so complex. I´m not very good in physics astronomy or biology but the debate is maybe more about politics.
I am very curious what you are talking about when you reference "steam" and its effects on global temperatures? I have never heard anything like that before, possibly a language barrier?
Most of what you said is scientifically incorrect and it is certainly not politics although most would have you believe otherwise.
The warming effect that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses like methane have on the earth is physics related. It has to do with the size of the CO2 molecule and the particular wavelength of sunlight that is being reflected off of the earth's surface. Greenhouse gas molecules are the exact size that is very effective at blocking this particular wavelength so less heat is able to escape our atmosphere with higher concentrations of these gases, much like a greenhouse. Which is quite unfortunate for the entire human race really.
I do have extensive knowledge on this subject which is why I try to share it with others!
Cheers!
I know methane is better at blocking reflected sunlight than CO2 but it isn't spewed into the atmosphere as readily as CO2 so it isn't as much of a concern to us.
Otherwise I can't think of what gas in our atmosphere is more dangerous to humans than CO2. THis is widely accepted by the scientific community.
I doesn't mean clouds, but clouds are very important for weather and to get local clima data you need weather data over decades. If you measure local sun hours and temperature over decades you can see the big correlation. A warmer average temperature in one year mostly means that you had less clouds. Clouds are a very important thing for local temperature data. In Austria are some places where they have data from over 100 years. Interesting fact is that they have more sun hours in the summers now but not less snow in the winter. They measure a lot of things, like the snowfall limit to the sea height. How deep is the snow. How many days with snow. The data shows that the glaciers get smaller not because of the winters, it's because of the warmer summers. That's not so bad because tourism's is very ideal - they have nice summers and also good winters. Hard to believe, but this is what the local data of the lift stations shows.
If I was to brag about a 0.2% savings as an engineer, I'd get berated, and rightfully so.
If they are really taking this to hearth we will hopefully see them finding a solution to the flying problem (e.g trains inside Europe, only fly overseas once, etc), which is granted not easy but necessary imo.
Dude, read a book , or two...The meat industry is THE number polluter on earth, doesnt matter how its done, it still has a much larger impact than a plant diet will ever have and its been documented for well over a decade now ...You may not like it, but it doesnt change the facts and saying something is a lie when it isn’t, simply doesn’t make it a lie....I know your dumbass President thinks it works that way but for the rest of educated world, the reality we live it is far different.
It's a choice to buy factory farmed meat, and one that I don't support
The issue is farming practices. Just as cheap meat is destroying the earth, so is cheap produce.
Go on shouting about an orange man that I never voted for and do some of that book learnin' that youre encouraging
That said I’m glad there is a team that is (hopefully) trying to genuinely reduce their impact.
And while it’s not for everyone deer and other ungulates also provide a source of meat with lower impacts, especially if the area they are taken from is already suffering from overcrowding.
I. We do nothing, and there is no climate change and no adverse/bad consequences
II. We do nothing, but there is climate change with severe consequences
III. We reduce CO2 levels and temperature but there would not have been a climate change anyway
IV. We reduced CO2 levels and temperature, and prevent Climate change.
Only in cases II. and III. did we choose the wrong action. Let’s disregard the predicted costs and likelihood of the consequences of II. versus III. But we cannot differentiate between scenario III. and IV. as there outcomes are identical, which means trying to reduce CO2 and temperature is the only logic action to take, because by taking action we will prevent the consequences all of the time, while by doing nothing, we only achieve this in 50% of the scenarios.
Or should they all just jump on Zwift?
www.pinkbike.com/news/zwift-adds-virtual-mtb-and-cx-specific-training-plans-and-vbikes.html
As we mentioned when we first launch this new goal, we know that fundamentally, a race team can’t be without any environmental impact.
Also it’s good to keep in mind that we are a private team which means we are independent from our sponsors, this is why we are focusing on reducing and offsetting the emissions of our team travels and activities and not the whole bike production.
We are not pretending to be saving the world, we are not perfect, we just want to start changing things to reduce and offset our CO2 emissions and hopefully inspire more people to do something about it.
However, we might be missing something, so we are curious and we would like to know what is wrong with not buying any single-use plastic water bottles, reducing our meat consumption and giving money to renewable energy initiatives …. ?
It's also true that it can be looked as a PR stunt but the reason why we started doing something is because other companies, athletes, producers, citizens started talking about it. Hopefully in the future talking about improvement without being perfect will be less polarizing.
Also, how well did you research the compensation goals? There's a lot out there that aren't really compensating but go to projects that would have gotten funded anyway etc. Not saying that this is the case here, I didn't check, just asking whether you did.
The water you put into the container, was it tap water? If you filled it from large bottles bought at the store the savings could be better if you used tap.
That truck you use for shuttling I see in the picture is electric I assume?
Did you specifically choose your lodgings to be CO2 neutral? That's probably a big one, building and heating (oar cooling) are a big chunk of energy usage.
Take only cold showers? There must be better ideas still.
For this trip, we had someone coming from the US, one from Australia and 4 other people in Europe. So Portugal ended up being quite central for everybody involved, so this location was the best for overall travel distance and also as a bonus cost.
Shipping the equipment was not possible due too tight timeline.
Since we did our first launch I’ve been communicating with a lot of people, especially from Gold Standard and Climate Care and I made sure that the money we put into projects would be the most efficient possible. The portfolio that Climate Care put together is made to help smaller emitters do a difference.
Even if we are emitting more than average, we are still considered as a small emitter and if we had gone about giving into a project that we found online, the impact would have been inexistent. If you want more details, check Climate Care out!
As for the water tank, yes we filled it with tap water, otherwise it would totally defeat the purpose!
We did calculate the mileage done with that truck and it was part of our offsetting.
As for accomodation in November in Lousã for a group like ours, the options are quite limited but we were happily surprise to that our accomodation had full recycling in place.
We have to keep in mind that we are still a racing team and that our goal is to do the best performance so we don’t plan on canceling test camp but we plan on making them more efficient and then offset what we can’t realistically change.
www.theverge.com/2019/12/6/20998898/carbon-markets-climate-change-global-action-madrid-united-nations-world-leaders-cop25
"De Oro, who lives in Guam and is attending the summit in Madrid, points to islands in the Pacific being threatened by more superstorms, rising sea levels gobbling up entire islands, and more acidic oceans harming sea life. “Carbon markets and offsets are false solutions and we really want real solutions,” she says."
What you are saying is the subject matter experts, subjected to unending peer review are all wrong?
Please - read the fifth IPCC report in full & observe conclusions based on science:
www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/SYR_AR5_FINAL_full.pdf
Chemistry & physics isn't political or subjective or emotional.
1. Yes you can, who told you otherwise?
2. They are working independently, trying to disprove results - it’s called the scientific method
3. Debunked, read further into what happened there
4. Not true, everyone gets a voice in the media & on the internet which makes this shit show happen
5. Sorry to hear that, he worth listening to
1. The more models, the more different results but it will never be possible to make a realistic model of such a complex thing. Too many unpredictable factors and to many unknown factors.
2. Its not really independent when you get your money from the same source.
3. The scandal was big, they tried to hide it from the public. Assange is still in jail and normal people don't care if he would die. He has no voice, no internet !
4. The IPCC has hundreds of journalists, real independent (unpaid) science do not have that power to cover up impossible things like the fact that there no complete data exists to calculate an earth middle temperature. This is not possible, but the Media does not stop with that bullshit, they still want us to believe that.
5. If you want to get sure that you can trust a computer program, it have to be open source. If you want trust computer models, you need the input data and the algorithms.
www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/licence-pollute-sham-carbon-offsetting-20873564.amp
Have a read of this:
www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-report-expanded-the-carbon-budget
Particularly:
"...What is clear is that very rapid emission reductions coupled with large-scale deployment of negative emissions are needed if the world wants to have any chance of limiting warming to 1.5C..."
Sorry to burst your bubble.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhpTr_ZJ4Gk
However, I think we have to be careful not to shout down those who strive to reduce their impact for being "hypocrites", while ignoring the vast majority who do nothing. It's like guilt-tripping vegetarians for not being vegan while most of us continue to eat meat.
It's pretty much impossible to live a normal life without impacting the environment, but we should applaud those who search for ways to get closer to that goal.
Props to Polygon for taking a stand.
Happy for you to Google other sources, but I find providing too much information turns people off.
Maybe read the second Carbon Brief dot org analysis to get a bigger picture of the problem at hand?
The *only* way we are going to solve CC is to immediately ration all CO2 emissions - and I'm afraid this means eliminating all unnecessary travel. Yep - our beloved sports will need to cease being.
I'm not sure I'm ready for this yet, but science tells us this is the solution we need to implement.
CO2 offset schemes make things worse as they steepen the curve needed to get to 50% emissions by 2030. Business as usual cannot continue.
They are also threatened by non-freezing winters, where the "vermine" is not killed.
Trees like beech are already dying.
And planting other trees in "compensation" for your flights won't help.
Look at yourself in the mirror, you are consuming too much, and you are pushing others to do the same.
Yes there actually are more important things happening in the world than two wheels clamped on some frame.
Props to Polygon UR to at least trying to be more responsible. It's already more than most keyboard warriors would commit to do.
Letter of Brian Cohen, 2748965#44845#7
Long haul flights are particularly bad and a ferry would take some amount of time.
Having just been to China, they eat lots of meat, but not really much beef, they also eat all of the animal and not just the western desirable bits. Would have been good to hear that the team followed a more eastern diet which is more sustainable.
It would be far better if they trained at home and sent data back to head office. That way they would have reduced the footprint for the support staff, travel, some foods etc.
Every little bit helps and I guess writing an article based on paying $127 is a start!!!! The rest is just normal life for many people. (I would chose easyjet to fly with as they carbon offset already).
All kidding aside, using ground transport as much as is reasonable makes sense, but not possible all the time for an international race team.
Modern world data works remotely.
Even in R&D and engineering.
Not everyone on the team is from Australia.
Its not rocket science. Its just data gathering.
My last work tests happened in India, China, Scotland all at the same time. I coordinated them all, yes we use a design verification test plan as we as running parallel characterization.
We normally get our test equipment in Germany and any RF testing in Spain.
Engineering and test can be done remotely. Just need a wee plan and protocol to follow. xxx
I think you are just goofing around, but I don't think that it would be more efficient to ship the team to each riders location. Or are you suggesting that they should just go ride wherever they are are and just data log by themselves, which isn't really the same thing as a team camp.
This is about being green, part of that is removing the necessary to haves and doing the must haves. If you are travelling across the world, you need to recover from jetlag so its counter productive to training.
Support can be provided remotely.
Not joking, if I travelled to every engineeting test I run I would be doing a lot of travelling, but we do most things remotely.
Pretty eco friendly as it is one of the easier materials to recycle.
www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=time.com/2976464/scientists-say-smelling-farts-might-prevent-cancer/&ved=2ahUKEwicha7iqrPmAhWcHzQIHdImBiUQFjALegQIChAB&usg=AOvVaw3TaIfEWBE_KtOCCHPzFlp2
All good and well donating a few $ for a few trees so you can feel better about yourselves, but those trees you've paid for will eventually just be cut down again and burnt by the next logging company for massive profit in 50 years time.
A local hi or lo has nothing to do with the average earth temperature. You can not make predictions without the data and it will never be possible in the future to get the data. It's just way to dynamic and complex.
Your statement "this is a fact of data" still shows that you never thought about which data is needed. It does not exist. We just have very random and local data with different and changing measure methods. They make clima models but they still have no clue how to calculate clouds. Sun and clouds are playing a big role for clima models.
Weather extremes are absolute normal, we do not have more of them in the last years. The media is just using those "normal and random" extremes for clima politics.