You cannot control what you cannot measure. To improve your business environmental credentials you need to understand where you are starting from. Developing a carbon footprint gives you the baseline to work from, here is how…

Ever wondered how to develop a carbon footprint map for yourself, your home or your workplace? It can sometimes be a bit bewildering – let’s see if we can simplify it for you….

It’s easy to be come overwhelmed by carbon footprint mapping for businesses, it can become very complex very quickly.

To simplify and try and build in understanding, we need to break it down into the various parts. I’ve found the best starting point to understanding is to do a map for yourself and household. This also helps generate a personal interest in the environment and saving money by being resource efficient, which is helps build commitment at a company level.

There are many great, free, online and pay to use tools out there to help focus on where you can be more resource efficient and environmentally friendly. Picking the right one can take time and often involves trial and error.

To help learn about carbon footprinting, the WWF has one of my favourite introductory tools for breaking down and calculating carbon footprint at an individual level. It’s also a great hearts and minds tool for the workplace, as it shows a figure against a UK wide 2020 commitment to reduce the UK’s impact on climate change. It also gives great advice on how to reduce a personal and household carbon footprint, which will save money.

When I need something to show a figure associated with CO2 to help with carbon offsetting, I use the calculator from carbonfootprint.org. It asks for more information but by ranking the carbon sources, it helps prioritise the reduction effort.

When this is for personal use, it’s about having an engagement tool that helps generate ideas for improvement. The most important thing is to check if there are areas of high use in your results so you can target practical reduction. However, for your business, it’s important to use commercially specified tools with up to date metrics for your industry, whose results that you can verify against local government requirements. This is especially important if claiming against CCA’s.

If you would like help developing a carbon footprint map for your business, we can do the work for you, or if would like build the competency internally then we can offer support and training on best practices in carbon footprinting. Either way, contact us here and let us do the work for you, or let us show you how.