Your Carbon Footprint that is…
We are proactive in reducing our carbon footprint and being aware of our impact and possibilities to reduce our impact on our environment. In addition to trying our air travel, through Climate Friendly, and wanted to offset the emissions of our other (essential) emissions-intensive activities.
Climate Friendly works with corporations, businesses and individuals to measure, manage, and offset their carbon footprint, by providing a quick and easy calculation tool, to take action immediately. While these tools allow you to calculate offsets for flights, electricity and car travel, we wanted to offset more than those things, so we sent an email to Climate Friendly to see if they could help. They quickly responded and sent us spreadsheet for us to fill in and return to them to finish the calculations.
Before we could complete the spreadsheet, we needed obtain certain figures, make calculations and implement procedures to produce more accurate figures — so we thought we’d share how we went about doing it…
The first figure we tackled was our electricity, dividing the KW usage (from our electricity bill) by 5 working days, divided by the staff members.
For paper consumption, we went through our invoices and extracted all paper purchases i.e. A4 80gsm, A4 110gsm, FlipChart per 60gsm etc. worked out an average over the period of time and tracked it in a spreadsheet.
Taxi travel and freight figures were extracted from our cashflow reports from our accounting system. For paper waste, we didn’t empty our 7 litre recycling bin for 4 weeks and measured how much we filled it for that period.
At the end of the day these figures are not absolute, but by continually measuring our consumption, our hope is that we’ll no longer be grappling for figures, working on guesstimates or making assumptions. We’ll have a more comprehensive understanding of how big our footprint really is.
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