Green business basics: How to calculate and reduce your carbon footprint | Manning River Times

Reducing green gas emissions has been a paramount concern here in Australia for the last decade or so.

And with Australia still being one of the world’s leading producers of greenhouse gases, it’s imperative that Aussie businesses act sooner rather than later.

Admittedly, there are more incentives for going green now than ever before. Not only are the consumers of today increasingly likely to support eco-friendly brands and businesses over their less ‘green’ counterparts, but clear-cut industry and tax incentives like opportunities for carbon offsetting have also been provided by governing bodies across the globe.

As the impacts of climate change become more readily apparent both here and abroad, Aussie business owners have elected to prioritise investing in sustainability themselves, swapping out outdated production practices and company operations for more streamlined, eco-friendly alternatives.

The efficacy of these eco-friendly swapovers has been gauged by companies calculating their carbon footprints.

If you’re a business owner who’s looking to enhance the sustainability rating of your own business, you’ll be happy to hear that calculating your carbon footprint is easier than you may think. In fact, with some simple investments in environment IIOT technologies, Aussie business owners can effectively automate their carbon calculations as well as the measures they will need to take in order to minimise their company’s carbon footprint.

But how exactly do you calculate your company’s carbon footprint? We’ll be outlining the four steps to calculating and reducing your business carbon footprint below to help Aussie business owners get started on their sustainability strategising.

The first step you’ll want to take is simply mapping out how you can gather all the necessary operational and environmental data to help conduct your carbon calculations. This preliminary step can be completed with ease by segmenting your company’s operations into distinct zones.

A good method here is to break down your production line or go from department to department. For example, you can separate resources consumed during materials and supply, from the energy used at production plants, or the fuel consumed by your dispatch fleets or other transportation following production.

Once your operations have been separated into zones, you can then implement business practices like physical records or better still, environment IIOT software solutions to help keep track of all relevant variables.

We consider keeping an eye on operational metrics like energy and resource consumption against the output of your production plant per working day, or any other defined period of time.

In order to calculate your carbon footprint effectively, you’ll need to ascertain how many tonnes of greenhouse gases (and other CO2 equivalents like methane and nitrous oxide) are emitted per kilowatt of energy you use at all your company premises or plants, and per litre of fuel or gas consumed by all your company’s vehicles.

All of these resource consumption figures are also referred to as your company’s ’emission factors’. Naturally, your emission factors will be easier to track through the use of IIOT tools, as these software solutions can be programmed to generate data surrounding the resource consumption of these emission factors.

Keep in mind that your company’s greenhouse gas emissions can be either direct or indirect. As you may imagine, the main difference between the two is that direct emissions are emissions that originate from assets that are directly owned by your company, such as machinery, vehicles, or energy used in order to power company buildings.

Contrastingly, indirect emissions are those produced as a result of your company’s activities, despite not being emitted from company assets themselves. Some examples of indirect emissions include those produced by cargo ships that may be carrying your stock or production materials, or any waste resulting from your production processes that may then need to be handled by waste disposal centres.

It’s imperative to track both your direct and indirect emission factors to ensure that your carbon footprint calculations are as accurate as possible. If you’re struggling to find figures or data on the greenhouse gases emitted by your transportation, waste disposal, or other production partners, you can request for this information, or perhaps even swap out these services for more eco-friendly alternatives.

Now that you’ve got all your figures in order, all that’s left to do is actually just run the calculations themselves. This is truly the easiest step in this process, but only if you’ve done your due diligence with regards to collecting all the necessary data.

Calculating your annual carbon footprint can be as simple as multiplying estimated greenhouse gas emissions produced by your emission factors in any given period by 12 for 12 months, 52 for 52 weeks, or 365 for each day of the year in order to create a grand total of CO2 emissions for that particular emission factor.

Then, simply add the grand totals of all your emission factors together in order to determine your company’s overall greenhouse gas emissions in the period of a year.

You may also opt to use a carbon footprint calculator online in order to save yourself from having to make manual calculations. Or, once again, if you are using environment IIOT software solutions, these tech tools may just be able to conduct these calculations themselves, allowing you to get accurate results without having to rely on CO2 estimates.

Finally, all that’s left to do upon calculating your carbon footprint is reassess your emission factors and introduce amended workplace practices with the intention of lowering resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across all the individual components of your company’s production line.

Keep in mind that these changes to your organisational operations don’t necessarily have to come all at once. Minute improvements to established operations can help ease your workforce into the new eco-friendly practices and initiatives that you’d like to introduce.

In fact, you may even find that incremental changes made across different worksites or departments can make a substantial difference to your business’ overall carbon footprint.

Developing a sustainability strategy for your business that includes a rollout plan for amended organisational processes can be a superb method for keeping track of the revisions you have made to your company operations alongside revisions that are impending.

It’s important to note that calculating your carbon footprint should ideally be conducted continuously throughout the process of greenifying your business. Monitoring changes to the key figures being used to calculate your carbon footprint can help provide insights into the efficiency of select revisions to business operations.

For example, if you’ve found that making efforts to reduce fuel consumption in your transportation division has held a substantially larger impact on decreasing your carbon footprint than investing in light sensors to minimise on-site electricity usage, you can elect to continue investing in transportation and fuel efficiency over the latter.

In this regard, calculating your carbon footprint won’t just help outline the potential for your business to become a more sustainable enterprise, but may also help map out the ideal pathways to see your strategies for greenification come to fruition.