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Our
Environmental Awareness
As a tour operator encouraging people
to travel to and in the world"s mountains, we have
to take responsibility for these actions. We audit our
environmental impact carefully, and have policies in place
to ensure we are a low impact operator. We are the first
to accept that this must involve a series of actions,
rather than sweeping statements, but at every level of
our operations we are working to reduce our environmental
impact.
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Zero
Carbon Footprint Campaign
Icicle is proud to be a
founder member of this campaign, whose aim is
to promote activities which have the highest of
environmental standards in terms of a zero carbon
footprint. Our use of the logo to the left is
strictly limited to specific courses that achieve
this. By following these standards on some specific
courses, such as some trekking and snowshoe courses,
you can opt to use no transportation (cars, trains,
etc) as it is all on foot. The benefit to the
local mountain environment is enormous, so look
for courses marked with the logo.
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Carbon
Offsetting Campaign
Icicle encourages all clients
to consider offsetting their carbon emissions
of travel to the Alps through a campaign such
as Climate Care. Click on their logo on the right
for more details. For example, the cost of offsetting
a return flight from London Heathrow to Geneva
is only £1.41. If you book transfers through
Icicle (click
to book), we only use providers who
offset emissions.
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Photo:
watching the sunrise from the summit of Kilimanjaro,
Sept 2006 expedition
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Our
Mountain Environment
We have a strict environmental policy
which ensures that we use the mountains in an ecologically
sustainable way. We carry ALL rubbish off the mountain,
and in 2001 the total weight of this was about one and
a half tonnes. It doesn’t end there, as we are proud
sponsors of the Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team in the English
Lake District. We also educate our clients in the methods
in which they can use mountainous areas. Our standards
are in accordance with the UIAA, and Icicle is the pround
holder of their Environmental Label.
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Icicle
Mountaineering follows and supports the UIAA
Environmental Objectives and Guidelines. For full
details on our label, read the
section below.
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UIAA
Environment Label
The label exists to promote high
standards of conduct and responsible access for climbing
and mountain activities. All label holders are giving
their support for the UIAA’s international work to
protect the environment and access for responsible climbing
and mountain activities. The UIAA is a partner in the
United Nations International Partnership for Sustainable
Development in Mountain Regions and works closely with
the World Conservation Union (IUCN) to promote protected
areas and access and conservation strategies for climbing.
The UIAA welcomes reports of good practice that help to
protect the environment and initiatives that promote sustainable
development. As a Environmental Label holder,
we agree to follow
the conditions and procedures outlined below, and are
clearly making a commitment to demonstrate high standards
of conduct in climbing and mountain activities.
1.
To
work within the current UIAA Environmental Objectives
and Guidelines.
2.
To
provide all participants in the activities covered by
the Environment Label with a pre-activity briefing on
access issues and procedures that minimise the impact
of the activity on the environment.
3.
After
the activities have been completed to provide all participants
with an opportunity for evaluation and feed-back on the
conduct of the activities in respect of access issues
and impact on the environment.
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On
all our courses and expeditions we follow strict
environmental guidelines, in terms of litter disposal,
sanitation, local
economy sensitivity & porter care.
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| Environmental
Policy in the
Alps |
| Every
client on our Alpine courses has an introduction briefing
when they arrive, and a significant element of this focuses
on the things
that each client can do to help the environment. As with
most things, simplicity is the best option, and most of
our actions are extremely low tech, but if everyone did
them the cumulative effect would be enormous. We recycle
all paper and glass that we use, and ask all clients to
sort their rubbish to assist this. All our accommodation
uses energy saving devices (e.g. bulbs and energy A rated
appliances) wherever possible. During seasonal renovations
of our office and apartments, we recycle all waste at
the new Chamonix recycling centre, where roughly 90% of
all material is recycled. Clients are asked to conserve
electricity when they leave their accommodation, by turning
off all lights, and to close windows and doors to conserve
heat. It is not exactly rocket science, but it all helps.
When in the mountains all clients are briefed on litter
disposal, and all rubbish is carried off to be disposed
of in the valley. Many huts
are now installing bio-toilets to reduce the impact on
the environment, and we ask all our groups to take all
litter with them to reduce the amount of rubbish that
the helicopters
delivering supplies to the huts have to carry down, or
the rubbish that some guardians choose to burn near the
hut. In
terms of transport pollution, wherever possible we use
larger group transport (local navette buses, minibuses
etc) rather than several individual cars, and all our
vehicles run on unleaded and are fitted with catalytic
convertors. All these policies combined are a step in
the right direction, but if you have any ideas about how
we could improve our policies in the Alps, please let
us know...
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Aconcagua
Base Camp
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Environmental
Policy on Expeditions |
| As
with our policies in the Alps, we pay attention
to every environmental detail on our expeditions.
Wherever possible we use other UIAA Environmental
Label holders to provide local logistics services
such as base camp services and porter provisions.
This is an obvious step to take to ensure that our
environmental standards are very high, but we go
further. Our expeditions are planned in great detail
to ensure that we are sensitive to the local economy,
and we ensure that all local staff that are hired
(drivers, cooks, porters etc) are suitably trained,
clothed, paid and looked after. On
expeditions we need to be a lot more aware of litter
disposal and sanitation, and we keep the same standards
as in the Alps. Often this necessitates getting
extra porters / mules / yaks to carry out litter
at the end of an expedition so that we ensure that
we leave the mountain in the same (or preferably
better and cleaner) state as we found it. Perhaps
one thing that should be mentioned more by others
is that keeping these environmental standards is
not a pain / drag, but a rewarding and educational
process. As with all of our operations, our
environmental policy is not static but in a state
of constant flux to ensure that we set the best
standards, educate others about them, then try to
improve again.
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| Environmental
Policy of Icicle in the UK |
| When
you book on a course or expedition, do not forget that
most of the logistics and planning work is done in our
UK office. Our environmental policies are just as important
here, and we operate from a mainly paperless office. The
majority of bookings are sent in online or by fax, so
a paper copy never exists. Also we try to provide an enormous
proportion of the information that anyone booking needs,
on our website rather than in printed form. We do not
need to send you any paperwork, but clients still prefer
to have a booking pack as then it is "in writing".
Unless
you tell us otherwise we do send out a printed pack, but
if you are sufficiently environmentally conscious we can
supply all the information via a secure section of our
website. As with every environmental policy, it takes
the two sides to work together to produce any tangible
results. Since 2000 we have
had an active Responsible Business (RB) programme in place
in all our operations. It covers areas such as local community
involvement, environmental improvements, employee well-being,
and health and safety. For us Responsible Business is
local
business. We actively employ Guides who live locally,
and encourage clients to patronise locally operated bars
and restaurants.
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In
the Alps we see increasing competition for land
use from cable car, road & house builders.
Never
before have environmental pressures been so great.
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The
Mont Blanc Road
Tunnel
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tunnel runs under Mont Blanc and links Chamonix in France
& Courmayeur in Italy. This 12km toll road starts
at 1300m above sea level, 300m above the valley floor.
It was reopened after a fatal fire started by a burning
lorry in 1999. The road tunnel is important to the local
ecomony for tourist traffic, but is also used for lorries
for road haulage. We protest strongly against the use
of the tunnel by lorries due to the amount of pollution
that they cause in the valley. There
are more environmentally suitable alternatives, such as
the Frejus tunnel, or rail freight. We support the regular
peaceful protests against the lorries, which often end
in heavy handed police intervention, as shown by these
photos.
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would be easy to argue that we are focusing on the micro
scale here, rather than considering the macro or global
scale. Put this in context, as we are a relatively small
company doing our bit. Mont Blanc is a globally recognised
peak, and it is in our back yard. Surely our efforts to
preserve the environment here have
global impact, and may encourage other regions to consider
their mountain environment with greater respect and sensitivity.
We live in an age where many people prefer to use their
energies for cynicism and to put others efforts down.
Perhaps these energies might be better focused on
helping
everyone.
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| Climate
change
and the
future |
| Ozone
holes grow, sea levels rise, sections of the Antarctic
ice shelves break off, greenhouse gases build up, and
glaciers retreat. It is not a rosy future at the moment,
and the key question is how much of the this is attributable
to humans?
Yes, there are natural cycles of warmer and cooler periods
(you will have seen images of the Frost Fairs in London
on the Thames in the 18thC, and may have read that global
temperatures were far higher than present in Roman times),
but most scientists only agree that humans are accelerating
the rate of natural temperature increase, but they are
not sure how
much. With the main governments seemingly powerless (for
political reasons) to endorse significant measures to
decrease the human
impact on climate change, the power and responsibility
must now lie with companies who have
the ability to implement change. This page has given you
an idea of how
we are trying to help, but is it working and what are
the effects in the Alps? The
press has recently given a lot of focus recently to how
Alpine glaciers are retreating and some routes have become
unsafe. For the most part these stories are factually
correct, but the implication of most of them is that this
is a sudden occurance and realisation. This could not
be further from the truth. Routes come in and go out of
condition over the decades, and for the number of routes
that are taken out of condition by climate change, many
new ones become available. The doomsday secnarios are
global, not just restricted to the mountains. Our hope
is that the responsible use and enjoyment of mountains
can
become an impetus and symbol for future actions for our
whole planet. We invite you to participate in our efforts,
and if you have any ideas of how we could assist the environment
further, please e-mail them to us.
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