Carbon offset site doesn't try to guilt you into giving up your mini-van

OK, let’s be practical. Not everyone can just ditch their minivan, even if they have green leanings.

One of my friends has six kids and another one has five little ones. Obviously, neither is a candidate for a teeny-tiny "smart" car. And even though virtual events (like the cyber-autoshow I wrote about yesterday) are bound to take off in the corporate sense, I’m reasonably sure virtual weddings just aren’t going to go over with very many brides.

Those are the very practical motivations behind EnviroCitizen.org, an online site that combines information about a variety of green topics with the ability to purchase carbon offset certificates via Carbonfund.org. There are more than 1,000 articles on the site focused on sustainable lifestyle tips and habits.

Mike Valenti, founder of EnviroCitizen, says while many other carbon offset sites make the assumption that their visitors are greener-than-thou, his site acknowledges some of the practical barriers that prevent people from being as environmentally sensitive as they might like.

“The most common thing that our visitors are offsetting is an SUV. They might have a hybrid on one side of the garage, but there is an SUV on the other,” he says.

There are two projects that EnviroCitizen’s offsets currently fund, both of which are more practical than revolutionary in nature.

The first is The Truck Stop Electrification project. The focus is pretty simple: this is an effort to provide electric hookups at stops from Arkansas to California to New Jersey so that drivers don’t have to keep their trucks idling just to check their email or keep their sleeping cab warm. The second project is a gas-to-energy project at a landfill in New Bedford, Mass., that is used to fuel four reciprocating internal combustion energy generators.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com