How understanding your Carbon Footprint can benefit your business

Over the last few years, carbon footprints (or emissions measurements) have become one of the key measures of an organisation's impact on the environment.  They do this by estimating the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions arising from an organisation's activities in areas like energy use, transport use, and waste production.

Carbon footprints can also be calculated for projects, events, services and products.

Carbon footprints can provide some key benefits to a business:

• As a way to reduce costs through a focus on improving the efficiency of the use of energy, transport and other resources
• To attract and retain the 'green' consumer by demonstrating that the organisation takes its wider responsibilities seriously
• To attract and retain environmentally conscious staff, again by demonstrating that the organisation takes its wider responsibilities seriously
• To demonstrate to investors, insurers and other stakeholders that the organisiation is addressing the climate change issue
• The quantification of emissions is a pre-requisite for achieving carbon neutrality by buying carbon credits

Why buying Carbon Credits may be appropriate for your business

Because of the potential marketing and publicity benefits, buying carbon credits can be part of an organisation's commercial response to the climate change issue. However, such action must be carefully considered so that it is not perceived as 'greenwashing', especially if a carbon neutral status is claimed.

At CarbonGroup we can help businesses to obtain value from offsetting, but we ensure that this is done through an integrated approach to emissions management.  First, we would conduct a thorough measurement of emissions, then suggest reduction actions, before identifying offsetting options and, if appropriate, purchasing the carbon credits.

A decision to buy carbon credits should be based on commercial reasons, such as contributing to brand enhancement or customer retention and attraction.  Buying carbon credits and achieving carbon neutral status is clearly more relevant for organisations operating in certain markets.

Note: we only buy carbon credits which have been certified by one of the leading international certification standards, such as Gold Standard or VCS.