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Responsible Business

Carbon Offsetting

What is it?

Aside from finding ways to produce less C02 in the first place, our customers can also pay to offset the carbon emissions from their holiday flights. It's simple: customers pay a fee to an offsetting company who use the money to remove from the atmosphere the equivalent amount of C02 being produced from a flight, so there is no overall gain of carbon to the atmosphere.

Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Holidays have entered into a partnership with MyClimate to find innovative ways to fight climate change and promote clean energy in developing countries. When our customers carbon offset with MyClimate, their money not only goes to reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it also helps people out of poverty. For example, one of the projects is an agro-power plant in India which uses existing agricultural waste to produce heat and energy. The plant prevents burning of the waste, will lead to an improvement in the quality of the groundwater and has created 650 jobs to date. The ash the plant produces is also used by local farmers as fertiliser for their crops.

All offsets are Gold Standard Credits, which mean that they are independently validated, adhere to best practice methodology and only support renewable energy or energy efficiency technologies (no tree planting or gas flaring). Most importantly they are additional which means they would not have happened if our customers hadn't provided the funding. Endorsed by 42 NGOs worldwide including many environmental groups, Gold Standard methodology was created to encourage a shift from a fossil fuel based economy to a renewable energy economy.

Click here to offset the carbon cost of your Virgin Atlantic flight.

85% of each donation goes directly to the projects.

It is really important to us that as much of the offsetting money as possible goes directly to the projects in this scheme, and not to some middle man twiddling his thumbs. 85% is one of the highest guarantees around on this, and we have our fantastic partners MyClimate to thank for that, who work tirelessly to make this margin as small as possible. The remaining 15% is spent by MyClimate on administration including payment processing.