Carbon Footprinting

Reduce your carbon footprint

Any climate strategy starts by calculating a carbon footprint to understand your organisation’s climate impact and to focus your emissions reduction initiatives.

Why choose EcoAct.

Advancing climate and sustainability consulting for 18+ years, we help businesses respond to environmental challenges and boost commercial performance.

1,500+

Carbon footprint assessments worldwide since 2015

120+

climate risks and opportunities assessments

18+

years of climate and sustainability consulting

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.

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.

Regularly reporting this data is part of a transparent approach to managing your carbon impact and will help you to comply with legislation.

How we can help with carbon footprinting.

Whatever you are looking for from a footprinting services, we can design a solution suitable to your needs.

 
Carbon footprinting

Organisational footprint

This service will help you to understand the sources of carbon across your company’s full operations, including energy use by your offices, processes and business travel.

We can also help you with a value chain strategy in order to gather the data and calculate a Scope 3 carbon footprint.

 
Carbon Footprinting - Product footprint

Product footprint

We look at the carbon embedded in different stages of a product’s life on a ‘cradle to gate’ or ‘cradle to grave’ basis, including the impact of the supply chain, materials, manufacture, installation and disposal of the product. Our product footprint service will help you to identify the appropriate product footprint standard to use (e.g. PAS 2050), the scope for data collection, assist in data collection and conversion to carbon equivalencies.

We also help companies to undertake Life Cycle Assessments of certain products and services to inform design and innovation.

 
Portfolio footprint

Portfolio footprint

Increasingly, asset owners such as pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds are acknowledging their exposure to climate change risk. By calculating the carbon emissions of investment portfolios, companies can identify and then take steps to reduce carbon risk exposure.

At EcoAct, we have developed a specialist portfolio footprinting tool, ClimFIT, to help organisations to measure and analyse their carbon exposure across varying types of asset classes.

Circle sky
 

What I’ve learnt while doing this project is that innovation will seize the day. Because when you have to innovate your way out of a problem, you do. I’ve seen it first-hand in supply chains. This is an example of it.

Anya Hindmarch, Fashion Accessories Designer

Read the full case study
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Key questions on carbon footprinting

What is a carbon footprint and how do you calculate a carbon footprint for your business?

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.

What is the difficulty in measuring Scope 3 emissions?

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.

Where do I begin with carbon footprinting?

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.

How do carbon footprint calculations work?

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.

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Carbon Footprinting

Our Guide to Carbon Footprints introduces the basic principles behind creating a carbon footprint and the benefits to your company of conducting a carbon footprint.

Gain answers to the following questions:

  • What is a carbon footprint?
  • What are the organisational footprinting standards?
  • Which standard is suitable for your organisation?
 

Factsheet

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Other Measurement and Net-Zero Strategy sustainability solutions

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Embedding climate and sustainability related thinking into strategic decisions is an opportunity for your organisation to innovate, increase investments in green technology, and accelerate emission reductions.

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Scope 3

Expectations for companies to measure and report on their Scope 3 emissions are increasing. Reporting Scope 3 emissions allows you to engage with your supply chain and obtain information on carbon emissions and reductions, energy, water and waste efficiency.

Read more for Scope 3