Initiating Sustainable Business Practices: Capturing and Reducing CO2 Emissions

The Companies all over the world has started putting an effort to do business in a sustainable way. As environmental regulations and resource scarcity become more pressing issues, the business will have to transition to be sustainable. This article focusses on how we can initiate a process to start capturing the emissions within a company to have a strategy to reduce the carbon emission to become net zero.

Overview

The goal of a sustainable business is to operate in a way that benefits everyone and everything in the long run, not just the company itself, which includes.

• Environmental responsibility:?A sustainable business aims to minimize its negative impact on the environment. This involves things like reducing energy use within the company, using recycled materials, or finding ways to create less waste.
• Economic viability:?It is not just about being sustainable - it also leads to cost savings and increased efficiency in the long run.

CO2 Emissions: How do we start capturing?

Companies can initiate their sustainability efforts by monitoring their internal CO2 emissions. Analysing current emissions is crucial for making decisions aimed at reducing CO2 output as part of sustainability initiatives. Companies can begin by tracking activities within Scopes 1, 2, and partially Scope 3.

CO2 Emissions: How are the Scopes defined.

When it comes to capturing the emissions, there are different categorisations, and this is widely termed as scopes.

Scope 1:

This refers to capturing CO2 emissions directly from a source where they are produced. Examples includes emissions from facilities like power plants, exhaust of vehicles like trucks or ships etc.

Scope 2:

This scope focuses on capturing CO2 emissions generated during the production of electricity, heat, or steam that a facility purchases.

Scope 3:

This category aims to capture CO2 emissions that occur indirectly throughout a product's life cycle. Scope 3 is more challenging to implement than Scope 1 or 2 because it involves emissions from a wider range of sources, often outside a company's direct control. Examples includes emissions from the production and transportation of raw materials used in a product or with the use and disposal of a product.

Scope 1 capture is currently the most mature technology, while Scope 3 capture is the most complex and has yet to be widely implemented.

How does an end user capture the data?

The data can be captured in the form of Activities. Here are some of the examples of different activities that fall under different sources within a scope.

How can Technology help you with Sustainability Drive?

There are many ways to start capturing the emissions. It could be in the form of an excel in a templated format or by having a simple web application to capture this information. The data must be stored in one central place, which is the key to generate reports out of it to enable you to analyse the trends and compare it the previous years. Microsoft Fabric is a platform which you can utilize to generate these reports which again can be built using Power BI.

However, the key is to calculate the emissions from the consumption that you have captured for different activities within the scopes. You can use 3rd party emission calculation providers such as climatiq for calculating the emissions based on consumption.

As mentioned earlier, the goal is to have strategic plans in place to reduce the emissions based on the consumption.

To conclude, we need the following tasks to initiate Sustainable Business Practices by Capturing and Reducing CO2 Emissions

• Identify the activities to be captured.
• Implement a solution to capture the consumption.
• Automation to calculate the emission based on consumption.
• Continue capturing the emissions for more than a year to analyse the trends in consumption.
• Plan the activities to reduce emissions.
• Repeat the process to reach a Carbon Zero.?