Environmental Reporting for Marketing Purposes

Being able to say you are “environmentally-friendly” or that you run a “sustainable” business are great for marketing as consumers become more conscious of the environment and choosy about where they buy from.

But in order to make those claims, you need to have scientific evidence to back up the claim. Large companies are being sued for “greenwashing” which is where they make statements about how good they are environmentally but cannot substantiate their claims.

The best way (and perhaps the only way) is to undertook a full carbon emissions footprint assessment of your business. The old saying “what you measure, you can manage” comes to mind. 

The first step is to understand what your starting point is. This is called the baseline. When you know where you’re starting and the long term goal is to reduce the carbon footprint to zero or as low as you possibly can, you can work out what the steps are to get to zero emissions.

It’s no different from working out how you’re going to get from your home to your holiday destination. You will have various options about how to get there, some will be more expensive than others, you may divert from the direct route to do something else along the way, but ultimately you know what your ultimate destination is.

The same applies to carbon footprints. Knowing the baseline (starting point) is the critical first step. Then the options on what to do next can be explored.

Carbon reporting as little as a few years ago was for the big corporate end of town. It involved sifting through substantial volumes of data, creating and maintaining complex spreadsheets and took hours of work.

Today, with automation systems like @Sumday which simplify the process and automate the mundane calculations the process can be undertaken relatively quickly. This is great news for small businesses who want to be able to use this as a marketing tool to stand out from the crowd.

There’s a window of opportunity to get ahead of the competition now as this type of reporting will become compulsory in the coming years.

We are proud to advise that this article was written by the team and not produced by AI.