Sustainability Reporting: The Importance of Calculating Your Savings
I love seeing how businesses have changed how they operate to embrace sustainability. In recent weeks, I’ve seen several initiatives that business owners have implemented as a matter of good practice and to do the right thing for the environment.
Within these initiatives are great ideas of what other businesses could do too, for example:
Using bike couriers instead of vehicle couriers to reduce vehicle emissions
Eco-friendly printers to reduce electricity consumption
Recycling materials to reduce landfill
Battery-powered forklifts to reduce fuel consumption
Skylights to provide natural light reducing reliance on electricity
Mulching to keep moisture in the soil to reduce irrigation requirements which results in less electricity or fuel consumption
The list goes on. Great work, no question.
Interestingly none of these businesses have undertaken scientific data analysis to determine how much carbon they are saving.
Carbon reporting to comply with the International Standards (GHG Protocol) that provide a framework for calculating carbon emissions provides the carbon footprint of the total business. Over the next few years as the Australian Government mandates reporting disclosures, the requirements will filter down the supply chains of large corporations to medium-sized companies.
Whilst not required by legislation, undertaking a comparative analysis of the sustainability projects provides data on carbon footprint savings for the sustainability projects specifically. This information will be useful when mandated reporting is required.
Think how much more belief would be placed on the sustainability projects if the businesses provided that data as part of their sustainability information now. Businesses already on the sustainability path can further differentiate themselves from their competitors by calculating and showing their carbon emissions savings data.
We are proud to advise that this article was written by the team and not produced by AI.