Green Car Insurance – the New Way Forward?

Nowadays everyone is looking for a way to make their lives a little greener, and there are hundreds of ways to go about it. Previously making a difference to the environment focused on recycling your wine bottles and changing all your light bulbs to the energy saving variety.

Fast forward a few years and there are now hundreds of weird and wonderful ways to save the planet. Holiday companies offer you the opportunity to offset the carbon emissions from your plane journey by paying a small sum which could be used to plant trees.

Supermarkets offer incentives in you take back your plastic bags for another shopping run. Even banks have been known to entice customers with green accounts which pay a small dividend to various green causes. It seems that across all areas of a person’s life there are ways to make it greener, and now that even extends to cars.

Motoring has never been thought of as a green pursuit. In fact for years driving your car was considered one of the worst ways to pollute the environment. In particular anyone who purchased a 4×4 vehicle; once the preserve of country folk and now the fashion accessory of trendy young mums; was considered positively against the environment. But things have started to change. Firstly a new range of green cars were released onto the market, which included fuel hybrids that claimed to be less polluting. Next came small city cars, some of which could run on electricity, which were defiantly less polluting. There was a brief spell when auto-gas was available as a lower cost lower pollution option.

Now there are websites springing up all over the internet offering advice on how to navigate through the green car maze and choose the best environmentally friendly motoring option for you. And it is not just the younger generation who are in on the act, driving greener cars has become popular with people across the board.

It was not surprising considering the way things were going, that after the introduction of green cars, green car insurance would follow. One such insurance provider is The Green Insurance Company, who claims that they will offset the environmentally unfriendliness of any car insured with them by planting trees. In addition they give 5 percent of their profits to charity and offer cheaper insurance deals for drivers of low emission vehicles.

The company has been built on an ethos of ‘reduce, recycle and reuse’ and acts on this by recycling as much of a car’s metal as possible if it has been written off and encouraging the use of reconditioned car parts where possible. It almost sounds too good to be true. Could this be the new way forward for car insurance, where green behaviours are rewarded with additional discounts and continual action to save the environment is carried out as a major part of the business. It seems that with the current popularity of the green trend amongst all sectors that this could be the case.