urteam

@honda50r: Once we publish our 2020 team launch video you'll see that it's all about teasing each other for fun as Alex is making a pretty funny appearance in our next video ...

What a rollercoaster it has been in the team, we tried our best together working on many challenges but achieving more than we would have imagined, happy to partway as friends and super happy to see you on a bike rather than scrolling too much on social media all day ;-) good luck for this season Alex

@ak-77: Hey! My name is Anne-Fred and I work with the UR Team. Thank you for your feedback, I've been working on this project of the team for a little while and I hope I can clarify a few things. 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.

@irahudgin: Thanks for the support, it's true that carbon neutrality is something that is all relative but at least the co2 offset gives us a tangible goal to work toward rather than the classic let's do our best. 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.

Thank you to everyone who supports us! 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 …. ?

@robwhynot: Great feedback! That's where we were coming from by saying we will eating more local and organic products.

@whaddasquid: Off course we know we are part of a system that push sales, but really our idea is to show that even if some activities are not fundamentally sustainable, there are still ways to improve. Now we start with controlling our own emissions, tomorrow we will work with our partners on having the same approach and get the ball rolling. In the end we are hoping to move towards a greener bike industry!

@vhdh666: Thank for your suggestions. We are aware of this but alimentation is a personal topic and we cannot impose to our rider and our staff to follow a specific diet. One thing is certain is that we will open the discussion about this in our team and I'm sure there is going to be some shift in our alimentation too.

@justttt-meh: Nice work!

@makripper: we will pass on the suggestion :)