How to Reduce Your Business Carbon Emissions

How to reduce your business carbon emissions

The most important thing you can do as a business is to reduce your emissions. We’ve put together a guide on how to identify where your business emissions are coming from, and how to reduce them.

Emissions fall under three scopes

Greenhouse gas emissions are categorized into three groups, or ‘scopes’ by the most widely-used international accounting tool, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol:

Scope 1

Covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources – e.g. emissions from company facilities or company vehicles.

Scope 2

Covers indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling that is consumed by your business.

Scope 3

Includes all other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain – e.g. purchased goods and services, travel, and waste disposal.


Step 1: Calculating emissions

It’s important to measure and make emissions reductions in all three of these scopes, in order to reduce the carbon footprint of your business.

 

The first step is to calculate your emissions. This will help to identify and prioritise the areas where there is the biggest potential for emissions reductions within your business. Whilst at Ecologi we do not yet offer the tools to measure your emissions, here are a few useful resources to help you: 

  • The Greenhouse Gas Protocol provides guidance and calculation tools to help businesses calculate their scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. They provide particularly detailed guidance on calculating your scope 3 emissions. 
  • The Carbon Trust has an SME carbon footprint calculator. This has been designed to help UK-based small and medium-sized enterprises measure their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. 
  • The Carbon Trust also has tools to help you calculate the carbon footprint of your value and supply chain  (scope 3 emissions). 

Once you have calculated your emissions, and identified which are the key areas for improvement, you can start implementing emissions reductions targets.

Other ways to make impact

There are several ways for your business to take climate action with Ecologi.

Measure your carbon emissions

We’ve been developing new software to calculate your business emissions in real time.

Climate Positive Workforce

Grow a company forest today, and offset the emissions from your team’s personal and professional lives.

Plant trees for every sale

We’ve got four ways to plant trees both manually, and with our integrations (API, Shopify, Zapier etc.).

Pay-as-you-go climate solutions

Create an impact-only account and make purchases of trees and carbon whenever you want.

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