Green Team Tree Planting at Ōwhiro Bay

This year, as part of our annual “Go Out and Do Something” initiative, ZX Security Green Team and friends headed out to Wellington’s South Coast to plant some native trees.

Wellington put on a stunning winter Saturday and, alongside other volunteers from GWRC’s preferred volunteer organisation, Conservation Volunteers NZ we managed to plant around 800 native seedlings in around 3 hours.

A back of the envelope calculation (given that we were planting mostly native shrubs), suggests that over the next 20 years the trees planted by ZX Security will sequester (assuming a value of 10kg per tree per year; 160 trees at 10kg/CO₂ per year over 20 years) of around 32 tonnes of CO₂. This come with a bunch of caveats (obviously ZX doesn’t own the trees or land, and those trees were probably going to be planted anyway, and acknowledging this is about half the amount that would have been sequestered if we had planted pines, and acknowledging that we should be prioritising emissions reductions instead of offsetting). Despite all these caveats, it’s still better than not planting though!

Keep an eye out for our next blog post which will cover our first Toitū carbon assessment and how it will influence our Green Team strategy going forward.

What is the Green Team?

ZX Security established the Green Team to make ZX a more environmentally responsible and sustainable company. As we began our work, we realised that the scope of activities ahead of us could be enormous. We found that it is difficult to gain traction on ideas when they are not tied back to a requirement that can be measured quantifiably. Learning from this, the Green Team strives to include quantitative measures when planning initiatives, ensuring we look for a way to measure what we are doing. For example, adding plants to an office has qualitative benefits and also incorporates the quantitative aspect of measuring CO₂ quantities in the office.