Carbon footprinting

Why should you measure your business’s greenhouse gas emissions?

Save money – helps you identify which of your business activities use a lot of energy and so helps you reduce energy and resource use.
Generate new business – if you reduce your costs you can become more competitive and bring in new customers.
Meet the information demands of your customers – helps you to meet customer requests for information on your greenhouse gas emissions. This is becoming an increasingly important element of the procurement process.
Do your bit – understand the contribution your business is making to climate change and reduce it.

How do you measure your business’s greenhouse gas emissions?

It is easy to make a start:

You already have the information you need
There are tools available to help you calculate your greenhouse gas emissions

Step 1: Identify which parts of your business you need to include

To measure the greenhouse gas emissions for your business, you need to take into account the parts of your business which you either own or have control over. This means that you are only measuring emissions which relate to your business operations. To do this, you need to set a boundary which will ring fence your business operations and will help identify which greenhouse gases you need to measure.

If you are a small business this will be straightforward, as you are likely to own or control all your business operations. In this case your boundary will be your entire business.

If the structure of your business is more complicated and includes subsidiaries, joint ventures, partnerships or franchises, your boundary will be more complicated to set. You will need to determine which businesses should be included in measuring your total emissions. Further guidance is available in the government's environmental reporting guidelines in Annex A.

Step 2: Identify which activities in your business release greenhouse gas emissions

Now that you know which parts of your business you need to include, you need to identify which activities your business carries out that release greenhouse gas emissions.

The main activities from your business which release greenhouse gases may include:

Electricity/gas use
Waste disposal/recycling
Business travel
Owned or controlled vehicles
Staff commuting

Step 3: Collect data

To calculate the greenhouse gas emissions for your business, you will need to collect data from each relevant emission-releasing activity. You should already have most of the information you need to collect this data. In the table below sources of the information for common types of emission-releasing activity are shown.

Emission-releasing activity	Source of information
Electricity use	Total kilowatt hours used from electricity bills
Natural gas use	Total kilowatt hours used from gas bills
Water supply	Total water supplied in cubic metres (m3) from water bill
Water treatment	Total water treated in cubic metres (m3) from water bill
Fuel used in company owned vehicles	Litres of fuel purchased from invoices and receipts (more accurate); or Vehicle mileage from vehicle log books/odometers (less accurate)
Employee passenger travel	Employee receipts for details of travel, and Use distance calculation websites to obtain flight, rail and road distances
Waste disposal/recycling	Tonnes of waste-to-landfill and recycled from waste collection provider

The quality of data you collect will be important to ensure that your measurement of your emissions is as accurate as possible. You may want to record your data usage in a spreadsheet.

This will provide a useful means of recording the data so it can be easily updated and can facilitate internal quality checks.

It is normal practice to measure greenhouse gas emissions over a 12-month period. You may wish to align this to your accounting period.

Advice

If you’re new to reporting, focus on gathering data from electricity use (electricity bill), gas use (gas bill) and use of company-owned vehicles (receipts from fuel purchased/ vehicle mileage).

Activity data can be difficult to obtain. Where known activity data is not available you may want to make reasonable estimates. For example, if you want to include commuting, you could base it on national survey data.

Step 4: Convert the data

To calculate the greenhouse gas emissions associated with each activity, you will need to convert the data you have collected using emission factors.

Data x Emission Factor = Greenhouse gas emissions

This can be done in a number of ways:

You can do the calculations yourself using the government’s greenhouse gas conversion factors

Annually updated emission factors are available for free on the GOV.UK website
To use these you will need the data you have collected (e.g. annual gas use from your gas bill). You can then input these annual figures into the appropriate spreadsheets of the conversion factors guidelines. The spreadsheet will automatically calculate the greenhouse gas emissions associated with this gas use. The DECC/Defra spreadsheets convert inputted data into kilogrammes of carbon dioxide equivalents

You can use an online calculator

Online calculators will calculate your greenhouse gas emissions from the information you input into the online tool. These tools are useful when you are new to reporting and the data you wish to convert into greenhouse gas emissions is simple. The Carbon Trust has a carbon calculator tool on its website which uses the DECC/Defra conversion factors

You can engage a local company to help you

Entering “carbon footprinting businesses Cheltenham” or “sustainability businesses Cheltenham” in your search engine will bring up some suggestions

Step 5: Identify ways to reduce your emissions

Once you have calculated your greenhouse gas emissions you can use this information to help you reduce your emissions and help you identify ways to save money.

Setting an emissions reduction target is one way in which this can be achieved. Further help on how to set a target is provided in Government’s guidance on how to measure and report your greenhouse gas emissions.

Advice

Set a target which:

Includes all parts of your business which you own or control.
Includes all the emissions you measure.
Compares your emissions over time to your base year or the first year for which you have reliable data.
Is achievable over 5-10 years

A target can be:

an absolute reduction target which compares absolute figures in the target year to the base year; or
an intensity target based on an appropriate normalising factor (e.g. water consumption per tonne of product, CO2e emissions per Full Time Equivalent staff member)

An absolute target is designed to achieve actual reductions in environmental impact. Organisational growth has to be decoupled from the environmental impact in order to achieve an absolute target. In contrast, an intensity target can drive resource efficiency and relative environmental impact, but the total resource use/impact may actually increase even if an intensity target has been reached due to increases in organisational activity e.g. production.

Step 6: Continue to monitor your emissions

To help you manage your emissions, it may help to:

Monitor performance throughout the year
Report internally on your emissions on a monthly or quarterly basis
Breakdown overall targets by Division, Department or Location to help staff “own” their targets at localised level

Step 7: Report your emissions

Once you have calculated your greenhouse gas emissions you may wish to report this information. This could be in your advertising material, on your website, or in your corporate responsibility report if you produce one. To publicly report the information you will need to:

Decide who would be interested in your greenhouse gas emissions data (e.g. customers, suppliers, staff)
Decide where to publish information (e.g. internal management reports, company website, supplier questionnaires and tenders)
Decide how to report your greenhouse gas emissions

Other things to take away

Calculating a carbon footprint is a great first step for a business of any size looking to understand its environmental impact, but it focuses on carbon emissions and doesn’t fully capture effects on natural resource consumption, land use or waste. 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 carbon emissions. 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.

Though reporting frameworks exist, the most important thing is that all material areas of your business are accounted for. What these are will depend on your size, industry and how you are set up.

The calculation is not the end goal, but rather the means to achieving a reduction in your footprint – first through changes in your operations and then through reductions.

Carbon responsibility shouldn’t just stop with your internal assessment. Encourage your suppliers to calculate their footprints too and consider including their policies around carbon in any tender process you run.

[Sources: government publications, Courier]

Business climate toolkit