New guide shows businesses how to count carbon footprints

17th June 2010, 11:42am

The Carbon Trust has today launched a new guide to carbon footprinting for businesses.

'Carbon Footprinting: The next step to reducing your emissions' explains how to manage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by understanding what emissions are caused by a business's activities or products.

It outlines the key steps that a business can take to:

Calculate its organisational carbon footprint – by measuring greenhouse gas emissions arising from all its activities and setting a benchmark for reducing emissions in the future. The guide also explains how to have the business's carbon footprint independently verified to help communicate claims with integrity.

Assess, communicate and verify the carbon footprint of a product – a product's carbon footprint includes carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions across its entire lifecycle from manufacture and distribution to its use and disposal.

Use a carbon footprint for ongoing carbon management – calculating a carbon footprint is just the first step in putting together a carbon management programme to reduce emissions. A carbon management programme can help to encourage innovation and create cost-savings across a business.

Hugh Jones, director of solutions for the Carbon Trust said: "Carbon footprinting is a hugely valuable tool for understanding the impact your business has on climate change. We have created this guide to help people understand what makes up the carbon footprint of their business or product, how to measure and communicate it, and how to use that footprint as part of a long-term plan to reduce carbon emissions. Footprinting can also help businesses to improve processes, cut costs and meet reporting requirements for environmental legislation."

The Carbon Footprinting guide is available online as an interactive PDF. Click here to download it.

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Andrew Deitz

21 June 2010 at 6:19pm

Carbon system should provide compliance with evolving WRI standards as well as provide answers to increase organizational awareness and communicate value with stakeholders. It is encouraging to see market leadership on addressing embedded /indirect carbon. On Page 5 of the Carbon Trust Guide it states that "There is more flexibility when choosing which scope 3 emissions to measure and report, and you can tailor these to reflect your environmental and commercial goals." If companies are going to provide real transparency to stakeholders and not greenwash then they should not tailor reports to reflect their commercial goals. To find real opportunities for stakeholder value and mitigation the footprint of all products and materials must be accounted for as part of the carbon calculation.

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