10 Steps to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Business

Page 20 STEP 06: REDUCE YOUR EMISSIONS Reduce your emissions STEP 06 Most of the steps described so far were to enable you to start reducing emissions. By now, you have set a clear ambition, signed up your partners, established your footprint, defined your strategy and built support across the organization. You are now ready for implementation. There is not one single way to reduce emissions internally. While one organization might focus on energy efficiency, another could focus on waste disposal or employee commuting instead. Although different in type, internal reductions generally follow the same steps – assign resources, assess the situation, identify areas for opportunities, get the commitment and resources, execute, keep track of progress and adjust where necessary. Whilst the Sustainability department may play a prominent role in driving momentum and engagement around this activity, there will most likely be an operational team that is better situated to take ownership of your internal reduction efforts. Reducing emissions from a specific source is highly technical and benefits from expert colleagues that know the ins and outs of the process. As well as securing expert knowledge, handing over ownership of specific workstreams to teams spread across the organization is a useful way to embed sustainability more deeply within the business. If you lead all sustainability activities from a centralized Sustainability department, you are not driving business ownership. Sustainability initiatives might even be perceived as the sole responsibility of the Sustainability team. When you spread responsibility across the business, it becomes an embedded part of the way your organization works - sustainability becomes everyone’s business. Once you have decided on who is taking ownership of the emission reduction task, the first thing you need to do is to establish the baseline. What data and analysis do you have? How robust is it? Do you already know where there is considerable potential to reduce your emissions? Your baseline assessment should include the relevant activities currently taking place, the level of emissions generated by these activities and how much your current processes cost. This analysis will be the basis for your proposed opportunities for improvement. When looking at the results of the assessment, work with subject matter experts – for example the colleagues who will eventually be responsible for implementing the improvements. This helps secure ownership and you are more likely to identify the best possible solution because of their expert knowledge. Having established your baseline emissions, you can start to identify areas for improvement. There is no easy way to go about this. Finding ways to reduce emissions means scrutinizing your existing facilities, processes and sometimes policies. If you have consultants on board, they may be able to share best practices from other companies and compare your emissions performance to peers they have worked with. For most sources, there are two different approaches to reducing emissions. The first option is where you reduce your carbon footprint by cutting consumption or production. For example, you could reduce the total waste you generate or the electricity you consume.