Pioneering Raleigh printer offsets carbon emissions

Barefoot Press, a longtime trailblazer for environmental sustainability in Raleigh's business community, has gone even greener: The company purchased enough renewable energy credits to offset all of its power consumption through this year.

Barefoot Press is participating in a program offered by Renewable Choice Energy in Boulder, Colo. After auditing a company's energy consumption, Renewable Choice analyzes how many credits need to be purchased to offset annual usage, which in Barefoot's case is about 105,200 kilowatt-hours. The money from the sale of credits will in turn be used to fund carbon-neutral generation projects like wind farms and solar installations.

The purchase of the credits will help prevent the emission of more than 71,000 pounds of carbon dioxide -- the equivalent impact of planting 295 trees or taking six cars off the road for a year.

It's an extra expense, but worth it for Barefoot Press owner Richard Kilby.

"Our customers can now feel even better knowing that in addition to printing on recycled paper using soy based inks and water-miscible, low-VOC chemistry, the electricity used in the production of their marketing material is purchased from non-polluting sources," he says on his company's new blog.

Headquartered on Pershing Road in Raleigh's Five Points neighborhood, Barefoot Press was founded by Kilby in 1987.