One Small Business, 17 Tonnes of Carbon Emissions

You’re a small business owner and you think you can’t possibly be emitting much carbon. That’s what I thought, but I put it to the test. I undertook an assessment of my figures for the 2022 financial year.

I specifically started with the 2022 financial year because I want to see whether the carbon emissions changed in 2023 even though I was not specifically making changes to reduce the figure. The answer to that will be another article.

By assessing the carbon footprint in an earlier year, I can use that information as what is known as a baseline figure or as a benchmark against which I can compare future years. The aim is to reduce the figure to zero in the coming years.

I was shocked by the results.

17 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents. 17 tonnes, for my small business! That’s 17,000 kg. That’s the equivalent weight of about 4 adult African elephants, 1,370 standard gold bars, or roughly 14 small cars. That’s crazy.

Let’s delve deeper into the numbers to find the cause of all these carbon emissions. 

Now I travel a lot for work, so I figured the first place to check would be my business travel and sure enough it’s a big number sitting at 4.82 tonnes. This includes airfares, accommodation and car hire.

That year, I drove long distances to see clients and attend meetings. The next place I checked was my Scope 1 fuel emissions. That’s not a pretty number either. It was 2.44 tonnes. Comparatively, that’s quite good as I did a lot more driving than what is classified as business travel. On balance, that number doesn’t feel so bad. But it’s still the equivalent weight of two small cars…

The next item I checked was my electricity consumption, Scope 2 emissions. Now I live in Canberra, so it’s either freezing cold or boiling hot. Consequently, the air-conditioner is either blasting out heat to warm me up or pushing out cold air to cool me down. 

I will admit that during my first winter in Canberra, I had the electric heaters (which were in the house before we installed the air-conditioners) on full-time. That was until I got bill shock with the electricity bill. No pun intended. 

As a result, the air-conditioners are only used when necessary and once the room is warmed or cooled, they are turned off. Nonetheless, the electricity consumption resulted in 2.72 tonnes of carbon equivalent emissions. Whilst I like to work at a comfortable temperature, I know I can do better with this figure.

Then there are the emissions associated with all the other costs of running my business. This includes software subscriptions, domain and website costs, membership fees, consultants fees, insurance, stationery, telephone and internet. These account for the balance of 7 tonnes, that is 41% of the total emissions.

This assessment was done using generally accepted emissions factors. What will happen over time as more businesses report their emissions data, we will be able to choose suppliers with lower emissions figures which in turn will lower our numbers.

The race is on to be the best in the business with lower emissions to attract and keep customers, whether the business is B2B or B2C.

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