Inscape Interiors journey towards a greener future
The complex but critical journey towards a greener future
In his latest article on climate change and the journey to carbon net zero, our Strategy Director Paul Mills ponders the big challenges facing businesses and where we might find the solutions.
When we think about the role of business it’s impact on climate change, the focus understandably centres on carbon footprint, but there is more than one issue.
We all understand by now that carbon dioxide emissions act as a greenhouse gas (GHG), trapping heat in the atmosphere, causing the earth to warm and contributing towards more severe weather patterns, warming oceans and rising sea levels.
The other issues at play include biodiversity and eco-system degradation, soil degradation and air quality.
The vicious circle of climate change
Deforestation, for example, undermines nature’s ability to regulate GHG emissions and directly impacts on the biodiversity of that region. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the population sizes of vertebrate species have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades.
Soil degradation and desertification caused by agricultural, industrial and commercial pollution leads to the further destruction of ecosystems and extinction of wildlife as well as reductions in crop yields. This reduction in yields leads to further deforestation to feed the growing world demand for food and resources. Ultimately, we’re not allowing the planet’s resources to renew quickly enough, evidenced by Earth Overshoot Day getting earlier and earlier each year.
On air quality, climate change is likely to have an impact on levels of ozone and possibly particulates, both of which are associated with increased mortality and a range of respiratory and cardiovascular health effects. The UK government has already invested £25 million trialling CO2 monitors in UK schools to gain insights into levels of CO2 and its effects on children’s performance in general and in exams.
Environmental management as the priority
The biggest contributors to climate change are the greenhouse gases (GHGs) and CO2 is the largest contributor to these so what can we do?
We need to continue finding ways to significantly reduce emissions by eliminating the burning of coal, natural gas and oil for electricity and heat. However, recent geopolitical events and their impacts, show us the challenge we face here.
We also need better resource efficiency through the circular economy – reducing, reusing, repairing, remanufacturing and recycling. The introduction of accredited environmental and energy management systems, such as ISO 14001, can help businesses become more efficient and sustainable.
Aligning your business with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can also help businesses achieve the so-called triple bottom line – people, planet and profit.
Reducing carbon the responsible way
Another issue businesses are grappling with is what to do with the hard-to-eliminate carbon emissions.
Net Zero, as a global measure, is met when the amount of harmful GHGs (carbon or CO2e) we add is no more than the amount taken away. Net Zero for business is met when we can minimise our carbon footprint as low as practicably possible and then are offsetting residual, hard-to-remove emissions with carbon credits.
For many years businesses have been offsetting the emissions they can’t cut to become carbon neutral. However, some are relying solely on offsetting with no attempt to minimise, which is failing to take responsibility as this satirical Cheat Neutral video demonstrates so well.
Carbon offsetting is especially problematic because of the unreliable methods of verification – how do you truly know how many trees have been planted on your behalf and what impact they will have. The time frame for those trees to begin effectively sequestering carbon is also much longer than people realise.
There are also issues in measuring a company’s CO2 emissions. Should it be measured on total business tonnes emitted, tonnes per employee or tonnes relative to turnover? Total tonnes emitted takes no account of business growth. So again, there’s no easy answers.
The motives to act on climate change
We would all like to think the motive to become a more sustainable business is purely down to it being the right and responsible thing to do. But there are many other drivers. Sometimes it’s a need to act because of the requirements of commercial tenders or a sharper customer focus on sustainability. Soon it will be a ‘have to act’ scenario with mooted carbon taxes. Competitors and customers may also be taking sustainable actions which may force your own business in to action.
Current HM Treasury guidance is that by 2025 all companies will have to report their carbon emissions. A lot of this is also being driven by investor and bank lender pressures because of the focus on ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment.
This can only be a good thing in my opinion, but again there are still many barriers to most SMEs in achieving net zero. Often there are contractual obligations which prevent change happening quickly enough – building landlords, vehicle, and machinery leases to name a few.
How can busy SMEs find the money, time, and expertise to cut carbon quickly enough? Which actions should we be taking and in what order? We need a better government strategy and more funding to be able to make the changes that are required.
Working together to solve climate change
The challenges described above often makes me wonder if it is better to have many small businesses doing lots of small things rather than hoping that a few large businesses doing some big things will solve this problem for us? The answer is we need both to happen!
In fact, we need large and smaller businesses working together to find solutions and make a real difference. A great example of this is technology for hydrogen fuel stack powered vehicles being developed jointly by multi-national Bosch and start-up PowerCell Sweden. Together they are developing a fuel cell stack in which an electrochemical exchange of the reactant gases hydrogen and oxygen produces electricity. The technology may be enough to allow cars and even large commercial vehicles to run on hydrogen. The issue, of course, is that they need to use green electricity in the first place to generate the hydrogen, if they use non-green electricity for the hydrogen generation then we are no further forward…
Still, such collaboration is exactly what we need to clear the technological barriers to solving climate change.
What we’re doing at Inscape
At Inscape, our carbon reduction efforts so far have included our Carbon Trust investment in 2010, signing up to the Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme in 2015 and generating heat through our own waste, production automation to reduce waste, home working/hybrid working, cycle to work enablement, LED lighting, electric vehicles, EV charge points, and robust recycle procedures.
Our next steps will be signing up to a fully measurable and audited carbon reduction plan. This will allow us to get third-party certification of our carbon reduction programme.
We’ve still a long way to go but we’re proud that our low carbon journey is well underway and look forward to sharing further news with you soon.
By Paul Mills, director of Inscape Interiors.