Carbon Accounting – what is the fuss all about?
The team at BSN are interested in the issue of carbon emissions/waste and the impact it is having on our world but we must admit we were a little dubious about all the hype around carbon accounting and reaching net zero.
With this in mind, we teamed up with an awesome company based in Australia called Trace (https://www.our-trace.com) to do some investigative work on our own carbon footprint……………..it was a very interesting journey:
Carbon measurement
1. The starting point is tailoring your financial spend data through the Trace platform and link it to different types of emissions.
2. We then pulled out our utility bills to analyse our energy usage.
3. We looked at how our team commute to work and travel to clients using the Trace engage survey through the platform.
4. Then we looked at what we do with our waste generated at the office.
The great thing about the Trace platform is once you have the data sorted it can cleverly use its algorithms on emissions factors to calculate the carbon footprint of the business for you. Here were our results:
BSN’s carbon footprint by category
We were pleasantly surprised that our footprint as a business 9.5t of CO2 per employee which is around average for professional service firms.
It was also great to see that 70% of our team want to do more to help the environment and would like us as their employers to look at what else we can do to help:
Decarbonisation plan
Of course, being a competitive bunch of people, we want to strive to be the best, so we started looking at our decarbonisation plan using the Trace platform to see where we could improve. We have picked 5 key areas of focus for the coming year:
We are going to track our emissions every year to ensure we understand where we are creating the most carbon.
We are looking at car sharing initiatives to client sites and commuting into the office/using public transport. There will be small staff incentives to encourage this.
We are going to help our suppliers get on the Net Zero train and support them in measuring and reducing their emissions.
We are going to look at how we can separate out our office waste with a composting scheme and better recycling methods. This may also help us save some cost with our waste provider as well!
We are going to set our carbon footprint baseline to ensure we hit certain target reductions each year.
Carbon offset
Not just satisfied with having a net zero decarbonisation plan we wanted to really push hard to offset all our emissions, and this is really easy through the Trace platform, so we had some initiatives priced up and bought into a few different offset projects as follows:
Again, not being happy to simply offset, Trace also helped us achieve “the classic offset” of planting some additional trees to make sure we really are pushing the Net Zero agenda:
We are really proud to say that taking up the C02 offset plan has meant that BSN is now a certified Carbon Neutral Organisation:
Can we help you?
As a practice we have found the process of assessing our carbon footprint to be really eye opening and it has led us to focus on a few areas to reduce our impact on the environment, whilst not impacting the top service we strive to offer our clients.
Many larger organisations such as the NHS, FTSE 250 Companies and banks now require SME businesses to know what their footprint is and have a decarbonisation plan to get onto frameworks and do business with them.
Make sure you don’t miss out on working with these organisations because you haven’t thought about your carbon journey:
If you would like help measuring your footprint and looking at your Net Zero journey it would be our pleasure to help.
As an accredited carbon accounting practitioner in conjunction with Trace we can do this quickly and effectively for you. Please contact us using the button below for more information and pricing: