Issue #3 - Carbon Calculator

Hi everyone, and welcome to the latest instalment of the People, Planet, Partners newsletter.

This week, with Britain experiencing its highest temperatures on record, it seems like the right time to talk about carbon reduction.

Increasingly, when companies are choosing who to work with, they want to know they are dealing with a responsible partner, one that can give them detailed information on the lifecycle of the products and services they’re buying.

A big step forward for Paragon in this area is our new Carbon Calculator. Because, while we’re making good progress in terms of carbon reduction at a business level, we needed to go deeper, and examine our carbon footprint at a product level too.

The products and solutions we deliver on behalf of our clients are an important part of their value chain. Factoring in the raw materials involved, as well as transport, packaging, delivery, and how a product is recycled or disposed of, gives a holistic carbon footprint across a product’s lifecycle.

For this, you can run two types of analysis – cradle to gate and cradle to grave. Cradle to gate gives you carbon data from the extraction of the raw materials through to the point of delivery, whereas cradle to grave considers the whole life of a product after it’s reached the customer and it’s no longer needed.

Let’s take a phone bill as an example. In there, you’ve got the paper bill, the envelope it’s sent in, and maybe a reply envelope too. We can calculate the carbon footprint associated with the manufacturing of those materials with emissions data from validated data sources like EcoInvent, and then add in the footprint generated by transport, packaging, and delivery to the customer too. Then when it comes to paper, the UK has a recycling rate of around 72%, so we assume 72% of these phone bills will be recycled.

All of this adds up to provide a detailed cradle to grave carbon footprint of an individual product, and that in turn gives our clients the total carbon footprint for the thousands or millions of these products they send to their customers.

The Carbon Calculator delivers the ability to measure cradle to grave at this detailed product level. What started as a spreadsheet I built myself has now become our ‘carbon brain’, with a front-end portal that helps our clients make informed decisions about the campaigns we deliver.

In the coming weeks we’re launching a new feature that gives our clients a high-level estimate of their carbon footprint for free. In doing so, the Carbon Calculator is helping key stakeholders to make more informed decisions. That’s really powerful because it injects accurate carbon data into the decision-making process. Decisions made solely on price or service no longer stand up to scrutiny and carbon impact must be considered.

As a supplier ourselves, we’re a part of our client’s Scope 3 carbon emissions, and we have a duty to help them achieve their own reduction targets. Knowing the footprint is one thing, but actually working to reduce it is another.

I’m really excited by the potential we’re realising through the Carbon Calculator. We can help clients to become carbon neutral, while at the same time working with them to develop a reduction strategy at product level. Measuring carbon reduction has started to generate greater momentum for change, where previously the lack of quantifiable evidence could easily stall this progress.

Ultimately, we want to help our clients transform how they operate. Using accurate carbon reduction measurements to support change is ramping up the speed of transformation and it feels like we are at the forefront of that movement.

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter, and if you have any questions at all, please add them in the comments below.

Lucy.