Great news – we have developed a Carbon Footprint tool to speed up our bespoke in house Carbon Footprinting calculations!
A Carbon Footprint measures the total amount of greenhouse gasses emitted by a business and breaks them down into scope 1,2 and 3 emissions. To find out more about the different scopes read our blog post.
To practice what we preach – sustainable growth – we tried out our new tool on ourselves and we’re going to remeasure our Carbon Footprint annually so we can track our emissions as we continue to grow.
Below is a breakdown of IEC’s Carbon Footprint for 2021.
The total CO2e from IEC’s business activities was 377 kg. The table below gives the break down between scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. As you can see, over 90% of our emissions were scope 3 emissions, meaning they are outside of our direct control.
IEC’s Carbon Footprint is relatively small as we actively engage in sustainable business practices, for example, our website is hosted on an environmentally friendly platform and our team either work from home, so don’t have a commute, or travel to work by cycling or walking. For context, the average SME in the UK produces approximately 4400kg of CO2e per year 1. This means our Footprint is less than 10% of that of the average SME.
As we either work from home or from a co-working space and we don’t own any company cars, the only source of Scope 1 was fugitive emissions.
Scope 2 emissions are greenhouse gases emissions that derive from purchased electricity. There were several different sources of such Scope 2 emissions and we’ve broken them down in the chart below.
We have programmed the tool so that it calculates Scope 3 emissions based on the five most significant sources. This is in accordance with the Carbon Reduction Plans (CRP) standards. Of these five sources, IEC only emits one .
The table below lists each Scope and type of emissions released by IEC, identifies the source and quantifies the amount we have emitted.
However, there is always room for improvement! Business travel by car is responsible for 76.5% of our total emissions.
If we had used trains instead of driving, our emissions would have been 70% less, decreasing our total emissions to 115kg of CO2e emitted. In light of this, we have created a company policy to encourage all staff to travel by train where practicable when travelling for business.
References:
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