We answer your questions

• What is Ecologi Zero?

  Ecologi Zero is an emissions calculation tool, designed to help your business work out your operational carbon footprint.

  The tool supports you through securely importing your business’s data, producing emissions calculations from the data for Scopes 1, 2 and 3, and helps you to identify where emissions hotspots are, within your value chain. Using Ecologi Zero over time will allow you to track your business emissions, and set targets to reduce them over time, in order to play your part in transitioning to a low-carbon future.

  Whilst complex – often very expensive – consultancy services to calculate business emissions are available on the market, Ecologi Zero makes carbon calculation more accessible: making the exercise affordable and rapid, and requiring no prior knowledge of carbon accounting.

• Who is Ecologi Zero for?

  The emissions calculator tool is most suited to SMEs up to 100 employees, primarily operating in the services industry.

  This is because manufacturers and producers of goods are better served by producing a life cycle assessment for each of their products produced and sold.

• How can Ecologi Zero help me reduce my organisation’s emissions?

  Once our system has produced your emissions values, the easy-to-read dashboard will update in real time with new transactions and emissions data, and you’ll be able to set annual emissions reductions targets, track your actual emissions over time and identify emissions hotspots – and Ecologi Zero will even make recommendations for how to make these emissions reductions, to send you on your way to zero.

• How does Ecologi Zero work?

  Once you’re on the platform, you’ll be able to enter essential information about your business, like your office premises, number of employees, and so on. This will help our system to calculate your Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (electricity generation) emissions.

  For your operational and value chain (Scope 3) emissions, you’ll connect Ecologi Zero to your accounting software – compatible with Xero (more integrations coming soon). Once connected, you can import transaction data from your accounting system securely into the platform, and Ecologi Zero will produce emissions values for each transaction, based on a “top-down” approach to emissions calculation.

  These emissions values are based on data pertaining to the emissions output of the industry that the transaction was conducted within. For example, if your organisation operates primarily in the air travel sector, your emissions output values will be higher than if you operate primarily in financial services – since aviation is a higher-carbon industry.

  This value chain calculator is driven by a complex input-output table to produce emissions outputs for each industry. You can make industry adjustments based on the specific context surrounding individual transactions, and over time our smart system will learn to automate this process, ensuring that the flow from input (transactional data) to output (emissions data) is quick and seamless.

  Read more

• How does Ecologi Zero calculate emissions?

  Ecologi Zero uses a number of data sources to produce as precise of an estimation of your organisation’s carbon footprint as possible. The base data layers used are complex input-output tables which produce emissions values for your financial transactions, based on average emissions figures across whole industries. The types of industries where your organisation spends its money – and the amount of money you spend in them – will therefore influence the calculated emissions.

  Example:
  You spend £100 on business software with Microsoft, and plug in your finance data to Ecologi Zero. The tool will match Microsoft to its industry (IT software), and take the UK average emissions figure from the IT software industry (which is measured in CO2e per £ spent), and then multiply it by 100, for your £100 spent. Ecologi Zero produces a footprint of 1.2kg CO2e for this purchase – because the industry emissions factor for this industry is 0.012kg per £ spent.

  For the moment, the emissions factors used to make the calculations are applicable to the UK only – we will be adding more regions very soon. You’ll also soon be able to include additional specific data about your organisation (such as vehicles, premises and energy) in order to exploit further data to hone your footprint even further.

  Read more

• What do we mean by service industry?

  #service-industry

  Businesses that operate in the service industry provide their customers with intangible products or services. Some examples may include marketing and advertising agencies, estate agents, architects, graphic design, e-learning, financial services, training and coaching, research, law practice, recruiting, information services, consultancy and many more.