Reduce your carbon footprint

A carbon footprint is a calculation of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.Your footprint will be the baseline against which you track your future climate progress. It will also enable you to understand your full impact across all Scopes of your organisation, which will be vital for your sustainability reporting and essential to achieving net-zero.

Scope 1: These encompass emissions arising from sources under your ownership and control, for which you bear direct responsibility. This typically includes emissions stemming from on-site activities, such as the combustion of gas heating or fuel oil, as well as the fuel consumption of your company vehicles. Additionally, any emissions released directly during manufacturing processes or due to refrigerant losses from industrial refrigeration or air conditioning are also accounted for here.

Scope 2: These pertain to emissions that you indirectly generate through your consumption of energy, which, for most businesses, primarily involves electricity. Your indirect responsibility lies in the greenhouse gases produced at the energy source by the energy provider, which is linked to your electricity usage.

Scope 3: These encompass all other emissions for which you have an indirect responsibility, arising from sources beyond your immediate control. This includes emissions associated with the goods and services you procure, the distribution and use of your products and services by customers, waste disposal, employee commuting, business travel, and various other factors.

Your carbon footprint should be compliant with an internationally recognised standard for GHG calculation such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or ISO 14064. These frameworks ensure that we are all reporting in a standardised manner and that your footprint meets internationally agreed requirements.

Many companies find that the majority of emissions lie beyond their direct control and within Scope 3 (this will include your supply chain, your business travel and/or potentially your investment portfolio). At EcoAct, we can help you to overcome the challenges of carbon footprint calculation to help you gain a robust and credible carbon footprint.

Starting out, you will need to understand what needs to be included and set the boundaries of your footprint.

Most companies approaching emissions calculations for the first time will focus attention on establishing their Scope 1 and 2 footprint before addressing value chain (Scope 3) emissions.

Identifying and calculating Scope 3 emissions remains crucial and often accounts for a significant proportion of a company’s overall impact – sometimes up to 90%. Data collection for Scope 3 emissions involves multiple stakeholders and data sources and so this can be more challenging.

Measurements should include 100% of Scope 1 direct and Scope 2 indirect emissions from your own operations (access our glossary for more detailed definitions). Calculating emissions follows a 3-step process:

1. Establish Organisational Boundaries
2. Collect Data
3. Calculate Emissions

Regularly calculating your carbon footprint allows you to measure your emissions over time, track progress made toward your reduction goals, and identify the most emissions-intensive activities to target your reduction initiatives.

A carbon footprint is calculated by summing the emissions resulting from every stage of a product or service’s lifetime (material production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life). Throughout a product’s lifetime or lifecycle, GHGs may be emitted, such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O), each with a greater or lesser ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. These differences are accounted for by the global warming potential (GWP) of each gas, resulting in a carbon footprint in units of mass of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂e).

Including all greenhouse gases, the UK average emissions are about 13 tonnes CO₂e per person per year.