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:Â
- 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.Â
- 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.Â
- The Carbon Trust also has tools to help you calculate the carbon footprint of your value and supply chain  (scope 3 emissions).Â
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.
Calculate your carbon footprint
Ecologi Zero, our free and easy-to-use carbon footprinting tool. Connect seamlessly with Xero accounting software.
Climate action for your team
Fund certified climate projects and plant real trees with a monthly Climate Action Workforce subscription.
Climate action with every sale
Automatically fund tree planting for every order or support verified climate projects with each transaction, through our simple integrations.
Climate action shop
Plant trees around the world, fund certified carbon avoidance projects in our Impact Shop. Take climate action on your terms.