ITC plans carbon trading venture

Under its environmental protection measures, tobacco and hotel major ITC Ltd is planning to foray into `carbon trading', a virtual trading of oxygen which is replenished by the company in the environment.

The company is also in talks with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Indian Institute of Science (IIS) to facilitate its entry into carbon trading, ITC Paperboard Specialty and Paper Division (ITC PSPD) chief executive officer Pradeep Dhobale said.

A team from EPA, Lawrence Berkeley (US-based science and engineering research firm) and IIS has visited the company's Bhadrachalam unit last week to access ITC's contribution to replenish oxygen in the atmosphere, he said.

ITC expects to receive permission to begin carbon trading within a year's time, which would be conducted through its PSPD division, he said.

Lot of industries across the globe usurp oxygen from the atmosphere for their operations and churn out carbon-dioxide, which is a green house emission gas (GHG). This causes severe imbalance in the ecosystem, he said. EPA, a watchdog that monitors such imbalances, ensured that such depletions are replenished by planting trees, where the onus of buying carbon positives lie with those industries causing it.

ITC, which has already planted over 27,000 hectare of trees in Andhra Pradesh, expects to increase it to over one-lakh hectare in the next 10-year period. This would result in more oxygen than the company has used, resulting in earning of virtual credits that can be "sold" to other companies that are not into environmental protection, Dhobale said.

The tobacco major estimates that there is a five billion tonne global demand for oxygen at the current prices of $3-5 per tonne.

ITC is also planning to become a carbon positive corporation, which could be achieved by aiding the growth of 600 million trees, he said. Of the 11,439 terra joules of energy ITC consumed in fiscal 2004, nearly 96.6 per cent was generated internally and about a fourth was generated through waste, he said.

The company has a social forestry programme and its pulp and paperboard unit at Bhadrachalam produces environment-friendly, elemental chlorine-free pulp. ITC has also roped in PriceWaterhouseCoopers to audit its latest environment-related data, he added.

ITC was also planning to move all its individual divisions to triple bottomline reporting, a new benchmark for high-aspiring corporates globally, from this financial year, he said.

Triple bottomline reporting is the basis on which a company's balance sheet would also show how it has deployed environmental and social capital.