![]() ![]() Identify the material sources of emissions. How to calculate (and offset) your company’s carbon footprintġ. Offsetting means investing in projects to an extent that enables them to capture the same amount of CO2e that your business is responsible for emitting. Finally, if there is no room to reduce, you can offset your emissions. The next best thing is finding ways to reduce emissions relative to output, so bringing down your emissions per product, per employee, or per some unit of revenue. The real win would be achieving reductions in your absolute total footprint, which means getting total emissions down even as your business grows. Once you calculate your company’s carbon footprint, you should do something with the information. But even though it doesn’t consider everything, for a company at the beginning of its sustainability journey, a carbon footprint is a good place to start. If you want a more holistic overview of your environmental impact, consider commissioning a life cycle assessment, which looks at things like land use, water use and acidification, as well as GHGs. It isn’t a measure of your use of natural resources, or the waste your company produces – though those might affect the calculation’s results. As the name suggests, a carbon footprint is all about your carbon (and other GHG) emissions. Your carbon footprint only covers part of your company’s environmental footprint. What’s more important is that your calculation captures the largest and most relevant emissions sources for your business. While you can organise your footprint into these brackets as well, you don’t need to unless you’re trying to report against the GHG Protocol specifically. Scope 1 emissions are those produced on a company’s site or directly by vehicles or power sources it owns scope 2 emissions are those resulting from electricity purchased by the company and scope 3 emissions are those occurring as a result of its activities but from sources a company does not own or control. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) is one of the most widely used emissions reporting standards – it requires companies to break down their emissions into three categories, or scopes. You probably don’t need to worry about ‘scopes’. That number will allow you to identify the most emissions-intensive areas of your business and opportunities for reductions, and buy enough offsets to cover your footprint. ![]() However, it’s possible to get to a reasonably accurate number in-house using online tools and a spreadsheet. Carbon dioxide is the most common GHG emitted by human activities, but the CO2e unit handily takes into account all other GHGs (like methane and nitrous oxide) as well, by putting them in terms of carbon dioxide.Ĭarbon footprinting and emissions accounting is fairly standard practice at large corporations and is usually handled by a specialist consultancy. Whatever the frame for measurement, the unit for a carbon footprint is tonnes (that’s metric tonnes) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Carbon footprints are usually measured in terms of an annual footprint that takes into account the impact of all the company’s key activities over the course of a calendar year, but it’s increasingly common for manufacturing companies to communicate their footprint on a per-product basis. ![]() A company’s carbon footprint is the quantity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that were produced as a result of its operations. ![]()
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