We take our Impact on the Environment seriously.

We believe that everyone has his or her impact on the environment. We have all individual footprints. This requires individual measures and ways to reduce our footprint.

We aim to know what our contribution is mainly to CO2 emissions and how we can mitigate them. Here is our promise:

Queenstown Heritage Tours is a sightseeing tour operator, based in Queenstown New Zealand. We specialize in tours into Skippers Canyon and in wine tours to the Gibbston Valley. We use resources like diesel fuel, water, air, energy and paper and we produce CO2 emissions and waste like used tea bags, used glad wrap, used cartons and glass bottles. This list covers our main resource usage and waste production.

We manage our footprint as follows:

• we monitor our CO2 emissions and diesel consumption regularly. We monitor the created CO2 emissions for our tours as well as for our communiting activities, like the drive from our employees to and from work.
• we monitor our water and energy usage. We know how much we use each year and for what exactly we are using it for. Therefore, we are in a position to use only as much as needed and we can limit our waste of those 2 resources.
• we prefer to omit sending out paper invoices and other information distributed on paper but rather send relevant information via electronic means.
• we strictly recycle glass bottles, cartons and used tea bags. We carry a trash can with us on every tour we perform and collect 'our' rubbish and dispose of it properly.
• we work together with the Department of Conservation in order to conserve Skippers. We pay a levy to the Department for every customer we take over Skippers Bridge.

Our goal is to have a detailed understanding about which task performed creates what kind of footprint. We want to reduce our footprint as best as possible. Where resource usage and carbon footprint is created and is not avoidable, we aim to off-set our damage done.

Here are the major results of our monitoring activites of the past 12 months:

1. 72% of CO2 emssions were created by our operation - through our tours
2. 24% of CO2 emssions were created by communting activites by us and our employees
3. the rest was created by the usage of electricity, water and rubbish disposal.

This result shows us that the majority of our carbon footprint is in fact created by the very reason our company exists: we create CO2 emissions because we run sightseeing tours. We believe, we can not omit those CO2 emissions and therefore have to simply of- set them.

On this basis, we researched companies who offer CO2 off-set possibilities and found Carbonfund.org.

Carbonfund.org is the leading nonprofit carbon reduction and climate solutions organization, making it easy and affordable for individuals, businesses and organizations to reduce their climate impact by supporting third-party validated renewable energy, energy efficiency and reforestation projects. Carbonfund.org has over 500,000 individual supporters and over 1,700 business and nonprofit partners including Discovery, Motorola, Amtrak, Dell, JetBlue, Virgin America and Staples.

Queenstown Heritage Tours entered into a partnership with Carbonfund.org in October 2010 and plans to renew it yearly. Here is proof, that we did what we say: Carbonfund.org issues certificates for every donation they received. This means that Queenstown Heritage Tours' operation is carbon neutral.

Certificate 2010

Certificate 2011