Environmental Charter

PLANETES project · Issue 1.2 (draft), 21 October 2026 · Ref. LIRA-PLANETES-WP0-POL-0022

1. Introduction

Purpose

Over the coming years, PLANETES will go through design, procurement, integration in Europe and test runs at the Paranal observatory in Chile. In doing so, the project will travel, buy, ship and compute. This charter sets out how the PLANETES team takes the environmental impact of these activities into account, and how it tracks it.

The charter is deliberately short. It contains a small number of concrete commitments (Section 2 and Section 3), a few indicators reported with the progress reports (Section 4) and simple rules for exceptions (Section 5).

Scope and status

The charter applies to all activities carried out for PLANETES: travel, meetings and events organised by the project, procurement, shipping and test campaigns at Paranal. It applies to every team member working for the project, whatever his or her institute; partners and contractors are invited to follow it, and the procurement commitments (EC-06) apply to them through the tender documents.

The charter is part of the rules of the project: it is cited as an applicable document by the Project Management Plan, and it can evolve independently of the plan (Section 5).

Guiding principle

At equal performance, the option with the lower impact is chosen. The charter guides choices; it never overrides safety, the top-level requirements of the instrument, the obligations of the project towards ESO or a critical milestone. When the lower-impact option costs schedule, money or performance, the trade-off is decided by the work-package responsible or the project manager and recorded. Nobody is blamed for a justified exception.

Effort where it matters. For a project of this kind, long-haul flights to Chile and the manufacturing of large equipment are expected to dominate the footprint, far above office activities. The everyday commitments of Section 2 are simple and visible, and they matter for the team culture; the project commitments of Section 3 are where most of the reduction can be obtained. The baseline footprint (EC-09) will confirm or correct this ranking.

2. Everyday commitments of the team

These commitments concern each team member. They are simple, and most of them are already common practice in the institutes of the consortium.

EC-01 Train by default in Europe

For journeys within Europe, the train is the default whenever the destination can be reached by a direct train, without change. This covers in particular Paris–Marseille (First Light Imaging) and Paris–Munich for ESO Garching. Taking a flight on a route served by a direct train is an exception. To make the train the comfortable choice, the project allows first-class train tickets. When a flight is needed, it is taken in economy class.

As an order of magnitude, a Paris–Munich round trip emits about 0.3 t CO₂e per person by air (including non-CO₂ effects) and a few tens of kg by train (Labos 1point5, ADEME).

EC-02 Vegetarian meals by default

Meals, buffets and coffee breaks organised or paid for by the project (meetings, reviews, workshops, visits of partners) are vegetarian by default. Other options remain available on request, but are not the default. Tap water rather than bottled water is preferred.

According to ADEME, a vegetarian meal emits about 0.5 kg CO₂e, a meal with chicken about 1.4 kg and a meal with beef about 7 kg.

EC-03 Video first

Meetings are held by video by default. A trip is justified by a real need for presence: integration and tests, reviews with the customer, kick-off meetings, or work that clearly goes better in the same room. When a trip is made, it is used for several purposes (e.g. a test campaign and a progress meeting in the same week), and the number of people travelling is the smallest that does the job.

EC-04 Equipment and documents

Computers, screens and other IT equipment bought for the project are kept as long as they do the job (target: at least 6 years for a laptop), repaired before being replaced, and passed on to another user or to the institute's reuse channel at the end of their use in the project. Documents are shared electronically rather than printed.

3. Project commitments

These commitments concern the organisation of the project. They are carried by the project manager and the work-package responsibles.

EC-05 Paranal runs

Each test or integration run at Paranal has a staffing plan, reviewed by the project manager, that justifies the number of people on site and the duration of their stay. The project aims at:

the smallest on-site team compatible with safety and with the objectives of the run; the other team members take part remotely from Garching using ESO's G-RAF facility (video link, remote access to the PLANETES workstations, as far as ESO rules allow);
fewer and longer stays rather than several short trips, and runs grouped when the schedule allows;
hand-over between team members on site, instead of all members travelling for the whole run.

A Paris–Santiago round trip emits of the order of 3 to 4 t CO₂e per person (including non-CO₂ effects), i.e. more than the annual per-capita budget compatible with the Paris Agreement. The runs at Paranal are therefore the main lever of this charter.

EC-06 Environmental criterion in tenders

Every call for tenders launched by the project from the issue of this charter includes at least one environmental award criterion, with a weight of about 5 % of the evaluation grid. Depending on the equipment, it covers: the electrical consumption in operation (e.g. the cryocooler and the vacuum pumps of the spectrograph cryostat), the lifetime, the reparability and the availability of spare parts, the reuse of the packaging and the mode of transport of the delivery. The criterion is assessed from the information given in the offer.

This is consistent with French public procurement rules: for every consultation launched from 21 August 2026, the buyer must use at least one award criterion taking into account the environmental characteristics of the offer, and include at least one environmental execution condition in the contract (Code de la commande publique, articles L2152-7 and L2112-2, as amended by article 35 of the loi Climat et résilience of 22 August 2021; decree no. 2022-767 of 2 May 2022). Calls for tenders launched before that date are not concerned.

EC-07 Shipping to Chile

Equipment is shipped to Chile by sea whenever the schedule allows it; the shipping lead time (several weeks) is planned in the schedule so that air freight remains the exception. Reusable transport crates are used and kept for the return trip and the later campaigns.

EC-08 Design for reuse, repair and end of life

PLANETES is an upgrade of the existing PIONIER instrument at the VLTI rather than a new instrument, and reuses PIONIER hardware where possible. At equal performance, the design reuses existing equipment and spares of the consortium, prefers components that can be dismounted and repaired, and limits the number of spares to what is justified by the risk analysis. At the end of the project, the equipment that is not handed over to ESO is offered for reuse in other instruments or laboratories.

4. Monitoring

EC-09 Baseline footprint and indicators

An initial carbon footprint of the project (travel, purchases, shipping) is made with the GES 1point5 tool for the year 2026. The indicators below are then reported in each progress report of the project.

Indicator	Source	Commitment
Number of trips in Europe by train and by air	Mission orders of the institutes	EC-01, EC-03
Number of people and person-days on site per Paranal run	Run staffing plans	EC-05
Travel emissions over the period (t CO₂e)	GES 1point5	EC-01, EC-05
Share of vegetarian meals at project events	Event organisers	EC-02
Tenders with an environmental criterion / total tenders	Tender documents	EC-06
Shipments to Chile by sea / by air (number and mass)	Shipping records	EC-07
Number of flights taken as exceptions, with reason	Exception log	EC-01

The indicators are compiled by the project manager from information the team already produces (mission orders, run plans, tender documents). They are meant to show trends and to inform decisions, not to rank people.

5. Governance

Roles

The project responsible owns the charter and proposes its updates.
The project manager checks the Paranal staffing plans and the tender documents against the charter, keeps the exception log and compiles the indicators.
The work-package responsibles apply the charter in their work package and approve the exceptions of their team members.
Each team member applies the everyday commitments and can propose improvements at any time.

Exceptions

Departing from a commitment is allowed when the lower-impact option is not reasonable (schedule, cost, health, family constraints, safety, availability of the equipment). An exception is approved by the work-package responsible (or by the project manager for the project commitments of Section 3) and recorded in one line of the exception log: date, commitment, reason. No further justification is needed.

Review of the charter

The charter is reviewed once a year, and when the baseline footprint is available (EC-09), in the light of the indicators. A new issue is released after each review.

References

Labos 1point5 – GES 1point5, carbon footprint tool for research laboratories: labos1point5.org
ADEME – Base Empreinte and Agribalyse emission factors (travel, meals): base-empreinte.ademe.fr