Most of us are onboard with the fact that humans have been overconsuming the earth's resources at an unsustainable rate. Action from a global, government, and local government level is still unsatisfactory. Everyone needs to start doing their bit, and hopefully each little bit adds up and makes a big difference.

We all love the satisfaction that comes with solving a problem – especially when it’s a gnarly one. So when we heard about Creative HQ’s Climate Response Accelerator, we couldn’t resist getting involved. Together, we’re helping some of the smartest people in New Zealand to solve some of the biggest climate-related challenges facing our planet.

To celebrate World Environment Day, we took part in Conservation Volunteers NZ’s tree planting competition at Tawatawa Reserve in Island Bay.

Nigel’s household is on a mission to lower their carbon emissions. They’ve changed their central heating. It’s been a full month now — check out the numbers.

The Ramsay family is on a mission to use clean energy sources. Their latest improvement is a system that heats hot water during the middle of the day when their solar generation is at its peak.

At Abletech we have embarked on the process of seeking advice and following recommendations. Read about some of our efforts below.

Today, we have returned from a lovely summer holiday near Taupō. The driving distance was 342 km, with an expected driving time of 4:40.

We are on our way to Whakapapa for a few nights. We have a 2017 Nissan Leaf with a 40 kWh battery, which is good for about 200 km of highway driving (5 people with luggage).

The story of converting the 1965 VW Beetle, to electric power, has gained quite a following.

Biking to work is increasingly popular with our developers. Electric bikes reduce the barrier of Wellington hills.

We’re keen to reduce our environmental impact so we’re using glass milk bottles. Remember the good ol’ days when the kids put out the empties? It’s just like that but instead of tokens inside a bottle, we order and pay online.

We’re proud to be using renewable and carboNZero certified electricity, supplied by Ecotricity, at our Abletech headquarters.

We had our regular team lunch meeting today.

Cars are not eco-friendly. Both fossil-fuel and electric powered vehicles require large amounts of energy to mine and process the raw materials. The by-products of the mining and manufacturing process are localised pollution (smog, chemicals) and global pollution (carbon emissions).

We were asked: are electric cars able to travel up hills at a reasonable pace, or are they really slow when hard work is required?

There’s a trend of transitioning from petrol and diesel vehicles, to vehicles powered by electricity. In this post, I’ll report on the growth rates of EV sales in NZ and similar overseas markets.

The car’s motor will slow down the car when you take you foot off the accelerator, and the byproduct is electricity which flows back into the battery. Technically termed Regenerative Braking, or Regen, this happens automatically (and silently) while you drive. It’s not something you think about.

Most people with electric cars (EVs) normally need to charge up the battery every 2 or 3 days. If you have a newer car with a larger battery, you might go a week without charging. If you drive longer distances in an older EV, you might need to charge daily.

There are 3 costs to consider here:

Our car has a maximum range of about 150 km before the battery needs a top-up. The journey from Wellington to Palmerston North is 140 km.

Last year I started recording our emissions, and we now have 6 months of data that is worth sharing.

One area we omitted from our first attempt is the contribution that comes from Cloud Hosting, the majority of which, for Abletech, is on AWS in Sydney.

Where do you start? The New Zealand Sustainable Business Network has lots of great advice. It has published a very good paper on how to calculate your carbon emissions. Following their advice and using the recommended ACE Carbon Calculator, which is an independently developed New Zealand specific tool, NZ is now starting to understand our companies’ contributions to CO2 emissions.