Loco2 was founded as a pragmatic response to the lack of options for people seeking to travel without massively increasing their carbon footprint. We're a small company taking our first steps in this big wide world, and we've had lots of help to get this far.
Our aim is to make low carbon travel easier, cheaper and fun. Too many environmental initiatives focus on the negatives of how terrible climate change is and how guilty we should all be feeling; we want to focus on the positives of living sustainably.
This website is our first attempt to offer some fresh thinking to sustainable and eco-tourism, but we're nowhere near done. We want low carbon travel to be price competitive with flying, and to sort out the mess that is booking European rail journeys.
Kate Andrews
Loco2 was founded in May 2006 as Kate was finishing her studies at Sussex University in Brighton. While planning her gap year she became frustrated by the lack of information about low carbon travel and dreamt of creating a website where environmentally aware adventurers like herself could find inspiration for their travels. She came up with the name Loco2, the tag line 'low carbon travel adventures', and won £1000 in a social innovation competition to take the idea forward.
She then decided that rather than starting a business she wanted to get on with the travelling that inspired the idea in the first place, and so in summer 2006 she packed her bags and traveled around Europe for four months by train.
Caught by the travel bug, in August 2007 she boarded a cargo-ship bound for Central America. And in March 2008 she made the bold decision to cross the Pacific ocean (Mexico to Australia) on a yacht. At the time of writing she is probably shouting 'land ahoy' as French Polynesia comes onto the horizon after a 25 day Pacific crossing. You can read all about the trip in the adventure section).
Kate enjoys drinking tea, dropping digital cameras off the sides of boats, and pretending to be a pirate.
Jamie Andrews
Jamie is Kate's brother. As soon as he heard about Kate's idea he immediately attempted to hijack it for his own. After plotting for months his plan finally worked in March last year and Jamie is now running things.
After graduating from Sheffield University in 2004, Jamie worked for a small company helping to commercialise renewable energy technologies across the EU. For the last year he's worked for the marvellous web development company, Torchbox, helping them to manage The Carbon Account. He's now finally moving to London and will be based at The Hub for the forseeable future.
Jamie has travelled extensively by train in Europe, getting as far as Russia in late 2006. Last year he went on a triple-festival extravaganza in Croatia and Serbia.
When not working on Loco2 you'll find Jamie unhealthily obsessing over the cheeky cockney charm of Bob Hoskins. Failing that, he'll be playing the drums or trying to find time to write a play.
Rosa van Wyk
Rosa has recently joined the team. Filmmaker, come Anthropology student, come wannabe geek, Rosa is helping to develop the site and strengthen the Loco2 community.
Each week, Rosa will be publishing blog extracts from low carbon adventures. She is also responsible for the marvelous new Loco2 Facebook group, which you should definitely join!
She also sends out hilarious and witty newsletters with extracts from the blog. Sign up to receive them!.
If you have any ideas for features, or if you want to contribute your own low carbon travel tales to the Loco2 blog, you can contact Rosa.
Other notable characters
Lots of people have helped us get this far and we're very grateful. They include:
Tom Dyson at Torchbox for hosting and technical work on the website.
Nick Lee at Torchbox for the lovely site design you see before your eyes.
James Cook for website user interaction design.
Jobs
If you're interested in working with or for Loco2 please get in touch.