10 Steps to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Business

Page 13 STEP 03: CREATE YOUR BASELINE You will most likely also have to start from scratch collecting some types of data. Do you know exactly where your material is delivered from and by which transportation mode for instance? Or do you sort and track your waste to such an extent that you can clearly determine which processing method each fraction goes through? There is usually a bit of detective work involved in reaching a satisfactory data input for your GHG accounting. Rather than getting the data for a single year only, consider setting up a self-sustaining data collection process to avoid manual yearly data collection. Often relevant activity data is captured in various parts of the organization rather than through a central repository or system. You can of course do a lot in Excel but for many organizations, a sustainability reporting software may be useful. By using this type of system, individual sites can fill in data on an online platform, which relevant users can access with a login 24/7. Most systems will have a built-in functionality that flags if your data deviates too much from previous entries and might even enable you to benchmark your data according to various standards. Besides the centralization of your sustainability data, some sustainability reporting software furthermore automate the process of translating activity data into emissions and thus calculate your carbon footprint. / Emission factors Emission factors are as important as the activity data and unfortunately there is not one single universally agreed and applied set of factors. Instead there are a variety of factors that live in different databases - the most widely known include DEFRA, EcoInvent or GaBi. These databases house datasets that detail the emissions resulting from specific processes, such as waste disposal, fuel consumption, business travel, electricity consumption and a number of other activities. For example, as part of the waste disposal dataset, the database would indicate that sending one kilogram of plastic to recycling will on average result in a certain amount of emissions, based on a number of assumptions around a typical process for sending plastic to recycling. Different consultants use different databases or even a mix of the ones available. The consequences of using one database over the other can be very significant for the carbon footprint that comes out at the end of your GHG accounting process. If you work with an external expert, make sure you ask upfront what they base their calculations on and why, to ensure their approach aligns with your desired level of ambition and perhaps previous carbon footprint work that you have undertaken already. There may be processes so specific to your business that they are not covered sufficiently in the standard databases. In this case you may decide to create emission factors related to specific business processes yourself. Make sure to document the assumptions you build in to your emission factors, this will also come in handy in case you want to update or revise them as you move through your program or if you need to answer detailed questions about your carbon footprint.