Measuring your business’s emissions can feel overwhelming at first, especially when you’re unsure of what to expect. That’s why we’ve created a 10-step journey to guide you through the process of evaluating your business’s carbon footprint.
Flow Chart
The step-by-step process
We’ll begin by getting to know your organisation, learning about your motivations, goals, time availability, and specific reporting requirements for your carbon footprint assessment. This includes gathering key details about your organisation, such as its structure and legal entities. This helps us to determine your organisational boundaries [more information on that can be found in this article]. At this stage, you will appoint a key contact person to coordinate and oversee the project.
Next, we’ll hold a session with you to identify the emission sources relevant to your organisation. Emission sources may include fuel use, flights, procurement of purchased goods and services and more. At this stage, you will likely need input from your operations and accounting staff. We will provide guidance on what to include in your inventory, ensuring it meets industry standards and compliance requirements.
In his step, you will gather your organisation’s ‘primary data’, also known as ‘activity data’- the detailed information necessary for building your emissions inventory. This includes metrics such as the total liters of fuel used, total kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity consumed, and total air kilometres travelled per person. To make the process smoother, we offer to schedule regular check-ins to provide support and guidance. We’ll provide you with a master spreadsheet to add your data in to, which we can access. A staff survey is often used to gather data on staff commute and remote work and we will provide this tool to you.
Next, we’ll guide you in setting up files and procedures in a structured format, making it easier to organise, locate, and save your information. This approach is especially valuable during staff transitions or if you plan to have your information verified in the future.
When all the data is collected, we recommend having it checked internally by your team. Once you’ve completed the data collection process, we will conduct a thorough review and provide support if any challenges arise.
Once this is completed, MyImprint transforms your information into a comprehensive carbon emissions inventory, also known as your carbon footprint. Established methodologies are applied to quantify the data, ensuring accuracy in line with current best practices. For this process, we utilise MyImprint’s own software - MyCarbon.
The next step we do is generating the report. This is a detailed document outlining your organisation's carbon footprint that aligns with international standards – ISO 14064-1 and the GHG Protocol. If you decide to get your emissions inventory verified by a third party, we can issue a MyImprint Compliance Mark for Carbon Measure, Reduce, Balance, or Sequester. MyImprint can complete the third party verification as we have a separate team for this. Alternatively, you can complete the verification through organisations such as BSI.
Using the insights from your emissions inventory, we will provide recommendations in the report to help you set reduction targets, develop an emission reduction plan (aligning with ISO 14068 where possible), and reduce emissions. These may include strategies for improving energy efficiency, adopting renewable energy, reducing waste, and other impactful initiatives aligned with your organisational goals.
After reviewing the findings and recommendations, we suggest focusing on areas where you can achieve the most significant emissions reductions. Setting achievable targets and developing a comprehensive emissions reduction policy and plan is the key to success. We can help you with feasibility studies [Read our Cedenco Case Study for more information]. We encourage embedding carbon reduction and sustainability efforts into your business strategy and daily operations, making them a seamless part of your organisational culture and workflows.
Finally, we recommend sharing your sustainability efforts with your clients and stakeholders. Focus on communicating your genuine commitment to reducing environmental impact.
Timing
In general, it takes about 3 months for a company to complete this journey. The times can vary greatly based on the size of the organisation, the amount of data collected and any challenges that might arise in the process. The time investment from the organisation could be around 40 hours but may be more or less depending on your organisations complexity.
Conclusion
While measuring your organisation’s carbon footprint requires time and effort, in a world of increasingly environmentally conscious consumers, it’s a smart business decision you can make.
If you have any questions about the process or how it might work for your company, feel free to email us at hello@myimprint.nz or get in touch using the button below.
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