Our core purpose at Paintvine, ever since our first event way back in 2017, is to bring people together, through the joy of creativity. We’ve had that tested in 2020 with the covid-19 pandemic, forcing us all apart in a time when we needed each other the most. We were able to adapt and survive through pioneering new ways to create in the comfort of your home.

Now, as we emerge from the pandemic we all face an even bigger challenge, as our changing climate accelerates we each need to do our part in order put the hand break on this change or else the world we love to create in today, will not be here for our children of tomorrow.

Today, we’re becoming a carbon negative company 🌱

What does carbon negative vs carbon neutral mean? In the simplest explanation, Paintvine will suck out more earth-harming carbon from the atmosphere than we put in. How do we do that? First we need to work out how much carbon we actually put in. This isn’t too easy, and without hiring expensive consultants and getting a dozen reports written we’ve decided to give it a go ourselves, here in plain sight to be as transparent as possible so that you can have confidence that we’re not just saying one thing, and doing another.

Working out how much carbon we actually create - the nitty gritty

Last year we hosted over 1000 events across our beautiful country. In this next year, we’re aiming to host over 2000. We’ll need to first understand all of the inputs hosting Paintvine event’s have to determine our carbon footprint.

Our biggest carbon outputs

> Transport

Our artists and assistants travel to and from each event, we’ll need to factor in how much travel on average every one of our artist and assistant team makes to work out how much carbon they expend into the atmosphere via their vehicles.

> Shipping

Around the world, we get a lot of supplies produced overseas and shipped here to Aotearoa. We typically get a new container load a few times a year. We’ll need to factor in our weight to distance travelled to work out an estimated amount of carbon the vessels use in moving our supplies here.

At home, we move those supplies to each of our events, in every region we run events in. We’ll need to work out how far they have travelled from our Auckland support office to sitting in front of you at our events. 

> Supplies

Our biggest supply inputs are canvas’ that you paint on, and paint you use to fill the canvas' with. We’ll need to estimate how much energy was used in the production of each canvas, and each litre of paint to work out how much carbon dioxide was put into the atmosphere for those energy inputs.

> Other

The pixels you are reading this on cost a little bit of energy to transmit to you from our web-server. The ad you first saw Paintvine on via Facebook or Instagram or TikTok also cost a little bit of energy for us to send out into the world. For this we’ll work out, on average how much energy our support office expends in order to market and sell tickets to our events.

Overall, the transportation of goods and people make up the lionshare of our carbon outputs, with the energy used to produce the consumables and sell our tickets required being the source of carbon dioxide Paintvine puts into the atmosphere.

Working it all out - the carbon footprint for all our events

After taking everything into account, we've come up with the estimate carbon impact of all our events and support office operations below for us to host 2000 events in 2022:

  • Transport (vehicles) = approx. 200 tonnes
  • Shipping (intl. + domestic) = approx. 1030 tonnes
  • Supplies (production) = approx. 35 tonnes
  • Other =  approx. 1 tonne

Estimated footprint per event = 0.63 tonnes of CO2

Paintvine’s estimated total footprint in 2022 = 1266 tonnes of CO2

How Paintvine becomes carbon negative

There are two primary methods of becoming carbon negative, the first and best way is to not produce any at all, by becoming zero-waste your footprint can fall to zero. Unfortunately, that’s not possible for 100% of our outputs, which is why the second method is for us to invest into carbon capture programs. 

What is carbon capture? Put simply, it's where we counter the effects of our carbon footprint through literally capturing carbon from the air (that we’re putting into the air) with one of life's greatest carbon capture machines - the humble plant.

Every 6 trees planted, will offset 1 tonne of carbon, per year. For us to reach our carbon negative goal, we need to offset 125% of our carbon outputs. Or 1582.5 tonnes of carbon to be specific. That means we need to plant 9450 trees, but lets round that up to a clean 10,000.

No. of trees to plant to offset each event = 3.78 trees

Investing in Kiwi carbon capture projects - we’re planting 10,000 trees

Our goal is to capture 125% of the carbon we’ll produce in 2022. To achieve this we’ll need to plant a lot of trees, 10,000 to be specific in order to capture the 1266 tonnes of carbon that we’ll be putting into the atmosphere in 2022 (and 25% more in order to capture more).

Thankfully, there are many, fantastic international initiatives that we can lean on that will do this for us. Such as Gold Standard and Carbon Fund. 

However, as a proud Kiwi company, we’d like to plant those trees here in our beautiful backyard of Aotearoa. So we’ll supporting local projects across Aotearoa where we can invest in carbon capture that will help us fulfil our promise to you of becoming carbon negative. At the moment our favourite is funding NZ native trees with Trees That Count.

Planting our tree, with guilt-free carbon negative events 🌱

So there it is, we’re planting our flag (or tree) into the ground and have become a carbon negative business so that with every ticket you purchase, is guilt-free and helping the world that we create in today, become a better one that we’ll all enter tomorrow.

Last updated 23/11/2021