Interesting efforts for a carbon neutral CIEL Ferney Trail 2020!

With a strong focus on sustainability, CIEL Group recently came up with an interesting initiative regarding its event ‘The CIEL Ferney Trail 2020’. The focus was to make a carbon neutral event.

One of the leading regional Groups in the Indian Ocean, CIEL is an international Mauritian Group that has a strong reach in textile industry also.

CIEL Textile is a world-class global player in textile and garment operations, and has its presence in Mauritius, Madagascar, India and Bangladesh.

The event is supposed to encourage practice of sports in Mauritius and create a social link between participants.

The CIEL Ferney Trail 2020, which took place on Saturday, saw around 2,050 participants, who came from all corners of Mauritius Island.

The only way to reach Ferney is by road, and therefore the Group anticipates that a large part of the event’s carbon footprint is from participants transport.

The Group observed what would it take to make it a carbon neutral event. It was observed that footprint would be approximately 14 tonnes of CO₂, and that 86 per cent was from participants’ transport.

This motivated the participants to use the ways that could have minimum impact on environment and generate minimum CO₂.

The Group also observed that if 50 per cent of the participants took 60-seater buses and 50 per cent carpooled (4 people per car), the event would be responsible for 7.9 tonnes of CO₂ emissions, almost half mean estimate.

In another scenario, if 50 per cent came alone in a car and 50 per cent carpooled 2 people per car, the footprint is almost double.

Since the exact journey of each person is not currently measured or known, the Group considers the distance to be travelled from key residential areas of Mauritius to Ferney: from Rose Hill (45.7 km), Tamarin (57 km), Grand Baie (75 km), Port Louis (55.7 km) and Curepipe (32 km).

The Group supposes that the average participant will travel the average of these distances, 53 km, twice (way in & way home).

“This analysis provides an order of magnitude for the total carbon footprint of the CIEL Ferney Trail and its components. It contains several assumptions and will be refined when new and more accurate data becomes available. At this stage, however, we believe it is a fair representation, for the purpose of communicating with participants and suggesting increased carpooling to lower the event’s footprint. CIEL Ferney Trail is for the first time not handing out participant or volunteer T-shirts, finisher cups, lunch and other ‘goodies’,” the Group said in its note release few days ago.