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Episode 8 - Elliot Poulter - Consequence - How to reduce your carbon impact
72 Plays2 years ago
In this weeks episode we look at how to reduce your carbon impact
We speak with Elliot Poulter from Consequence about:
🫧 What is the difference between carbon neutrality and net zero
📈 The business opportunity of taking action vs risk of inaction
👣 How do you determine what your carbon footprint is?
🌳 How do you mitigate that footprint?
💰 Is offsetting just a cost or can it bring an ROI?
🔄 Looking at the overall carbon lifecycle when making decisions
Recommended
Transcript
Quick Dive into Business Processes
00:00:00
Speaker
I would just say get stuck in. I think you can get started a lot quicker than people think and get to that point within a couple of weeks of starting even faster than that. And then you can look at
00:00:17
Speaker
you know, going into more detail on those like really impactful areas of your business or based on like your goal, you might choose like not to do that at all, right? But at least you're tracking something and you have an idea of what's going on in the business.
Introduction by Matt Nalley
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome to Survey Booker Sessions. Tune in to hear from people working in a range of industries and roles to provide you ideas that you can take away and use in your own business. I'm your host, Matt Nalley, the founder and director of Survey Booker, which is the leading CRM and survey management system for surveyors.
00:00:47
Speaker
So on today's episode, we have Elliot, who is the co-founder of Consequence. So thanks for coming on today, Elliot. Hi, Matt. Yeah, great to be here.
Mission of Consequence Explained
00:00:54
Speaker
Do you want to give us an overview of what Consequence is and how you got started with it? Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on. Great to be here. Yeah, so it's a consequence, like who are we, what we do. I mean, to start off with, we help businesses to achieve net zero.
00:01:12
Speaker
So that's the sort of short story of what we do. We've been doing this business for two and a half years now. And even the name was pretty deliberate and consequence, you know, being something actually broader than even net zero. And what do we mean by net zero, right? This is to do with carbon and emissions and the stuff that we hear in the news all the time. But my co-founder and I,
00:01:40
Speaker
started this business with my with my brother, James, we were thinking about how do we help businesses to take accountability for what we what we term like externalities of doing business. And one of them is carbon, right, but it's also
00:02:00
Speaker
a lot of mainly we focus on environmental, but we know that there's like social and other externalities of doing business. But, you know, carbon, water use, land use, impacts on biodiversity, all these things have an impact and a sort of like a social cost. And our approach was
00:02:19
Speaker
not to be supportive of business leaders to take accountability and be able to do something useful with that information. So yeah, we started a business two and a half years ago and yeah, been helping and focused on the carbon issue to begin with and then helping businesses to get to net zero.
Net Zero vs Carbon Neutral
00:02:38
Speaker
I suppose that's a nice segue into, is it worth covering what net zero is or certified net zero or carbon neutral? Because there's lots of different terms that get sort of spouted about.
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Lots of different definitions and they're changing all the time, like you say. And I think the most important thing for people to remember and when we talk with our customers is it's actually about the story that you build around like the claim that you make, like we are carbon neutral or certified net zero or whatever that is going to be, because there are different authoritative sources that run
00:03:19
Speaker
And so just because you're doing it one way doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing it wrong, but it's really important to like know the difference. So carbon neutral has been around for a lot longer than net zero. And carbon neutral really means like, are you offsetting or you're basically putting emissions out by driving your car around, heating your office, buying equipment that you do for surveying sites,
00:03:49
Speaker
Are you then offsetting that or mitigating it with like a carbon offset project? And so to be carbon neutral would be, you know, all the emissions you put out, you know, minus all the emissions that you mitigate would be carbon neutral. And then net zero was where
00:04:09
Speaker
You know, and again, there's a couple of different definitions here, and I'll give, I'll give sort of like two different ones. So the addition to carbon neutral on one of them was looking at all of the sort of indirect emissions of your business. So things that you don't directly control. So it's like looking at like the emissions that come from the products from your suppliers, for example, and then, you know, offsetting and mitigating those, you could consider yourself to be net zero. And then.
00:04:39
Speaker
I think the one that's the most prominent now and the one that say like the UK government is signed up to really is, you know, we're talking about net zero 2050, and then like, you know, short term targets at 2030. These are all around like a science based target approach to net zero that talks about, you know, we need to limit global warming by a certain amount, you know, one and a half degrees or two degrees. And net zero says that we need to actually reduce
00:05:14
Speaker
remaining amount. So net zero, if you got like a 2050 target would require you to reduce your emissions by 95%, you know, roughly from what it is today, and then only offset the final 5%. So that's the big difference between the two. If you're actually going to sign up to net zero, it's going to put a lot more sort of pressure on you to actually look at what you're doing in your business and actually change it.
00:05:44
Speaker
purchasing offsets. It's quite a tough difference actually. Do you think there's going to be a move towards, I suppose more with more businesses going carbon neutral, but do you think there's going to be a big shift towards net zero or is it really quite onerous to achieve?
Steps Towards Carbon Neutrality
00:05:59
Speaker
Oh man, yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think the way that I talk to customers about it is you're going to do carbon neutral first because net zero is something that you can't do alone because it's designed in a very particular way such that it relies also on your other stakeholders that you do business with, your suppliers and also your customers, as well as what you do yourself.
00:06:26
Speaker
So if you've got a big office that you rent, if the landlord isn't using renewable energy for that, it's going to be very difficult for you to get down to net zero. So I think carbon neutral is sort of like a more achievable early step. You can pretty much achieve that from day one because you can purchase these offsets to mitigate. And that has a lot of good advantages.
00:06:54
Speaker
However, I just think where the world is going, the reasons for getting into carbon neutral and net zero in the first place, you've got the social global good that you want to do as an individual in a business. But then there's also the business opportunity that comes with taking action. And there's also the risk of inaction in the space.
00:07:20
Speaker
Carbon offsetting and carbon neutrality is certainly like coming under more scrutiny and more fire. So net zero is a lot more ambitious as a goal, but it's something that if you're sort of like making progress towards, you know, when you come under that scrutiny, you're likely to come out better than if you're just doing carbon neutral. You know, I say all that like,
00:07:48
Speaker
If you're a small growing business, you know, and you're growing or you're just a small business, like net zero can be very, very difficult for you to achieve because you need to influence, you know, your suppliers, you need to influence other people. And if you're an SME, you only have so much power to do that. So, you know,
00:08:11
Speaker
It's difficult and that's why like right at the beginning, you know, I think it's like really important about like the story that you tell. I've talked to companies. Actually, it was a it was a construction company in the US. They were up in the Detroit area.
00:08:28
Speaker
and they they've been doing this stuff before net zero came into vogue you know they've been doing it for 10 plus years and they don't really have like a
00:08:42
Speaker
a badge or anything that says, hey, we're carbon neutral and net zero. But they've got all the data in there. They're doing all the reporting. They are doing offsets. And they're also building a story about how they're choosing different materials or they're doing different design decisions in order to reduce
00:09:00
Speaker
of these buildings that they're constructing. So at that perspective, you've got a really strong story. And if you do that, you can almost worry about these certain certifications less when you're of a certain size organization like that, if you're a bit smaller.
00:09:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Measuring and Mitigating Carbon Footprints
00:09:20
Speaker
It's a good point. In terms of the where do you start? You're an SME. It's quite, I think it potentially seems quite daunting because, you know, there are a lot of, I suppose, different options out there in terms of what, I don't know what's best. So you've got things like, you know, planting trees or one tree for every customer it might be or however someone sets that up.
00:09:40
Speaker
And then there's platforms like yours where, you know, I found it very, very easy coming onto it. And this isn't obviously meant to be a plug-in, a consequence specifically, but it was very easy. You just sort of, I suppose, plug in your accounting feed or bank feed and it just gets calculated and then you've got your figure at the end. But is there a right?
00:09:56
Speaker
a better route or are there some routes that aren't as beneficial as they sort of suggest they might be because we hear lots of things about I don't know you know trees get planted but how many actually survive and all this kind of stuff so yeah it's it's um there's there's two sides I think to the question one one is um how do you determine what your carbon
00:10:19
Speaker
And then there's how do you do mitigation? You know, when we talk about mitigation, we've already talked about reduction. So it's like changing what you do. And then there's carbon offsets, which is to sort of net out the emissions that you haven't been able to reduce. On the calculation side,
00:10:40
Speaker
It all goes back to like what your goal is, you know, like, um, and what the claim that you want to put out there, because, um, especially as an SME, right? And, and I think if you're less than a hundred people, you know, I would have different advice to that sort of size business versus, you know, someone that's over a hundred or two 50 or a thousand, even, right? If we still consider that to be a medium size company, um,
00:11:10
Speaker
So based on that claim, and what do I mean by that is, are you putting it out in public or is it internal? What kind of claim are you making? Are you saying carbon neutral or net zero? Or are you just saying that you want to take accountability and it's something that's more vague? Are you having to use it in bids to win business? So it's like a compliance thing.
00:11:36
Speaker
based on that claim and that goal, that really drives and guides both those other two things that we do, like when it comes to measurement and when it comes to mitigation. So in the measurement side, there are solutions out there that are great in that they require absolutely no effort. You'll go in, you just put in how many employees you have, and it does an average estimate
00:12:06
Speaker
on the carbon footprint of the average person in the UK and you know which is like roughly 10 tons a year and and then it will allow you to start planting trees right but the that's great because it's easy the downside of that is you have no visibility into your carbon footprint and you have no ability therefore to make any changes and so I would say that's only suitable for a
00:12:34
Speaker
very light claim that you're going to make. It's not even useful internally, right? It's a bit of smoke and mirrors, frankly, in my opinion. On that, you can't really make any positive changes. So a tool like Consequence allows you to go very, very deep into the data. But what we try and do is bring in a lot of automation to help save time. So it's still easy for you, like you've said. And so you'll bring in these different data
00:13:07
Speaker
companies, there's also these all these other steps that you can also go through. Because you need to be that much more rigorous based on the claims that you're making. I can go into that in more detail if you know, you've got a follow up question on that. And then, you know, the mitigation side. That's a whole thing. You know, that's, um,
00:13:29
Speaker
short of the consequence that says, can you explain how you do calculation? Asking about our offset portfolio or just asking for advice on offsets is the number one question that we get.
00:13:44
Speaker
because we see it in the news all the time. And so it's like a high risk thing. Like you might be putting a substantial amount of money into an offset. Offsets cost anything from, let's just say 10 pounds up to well over a hundred pounds per ton.
00:14:05
Speaker
So, you know, if your business is 10 people, let's just say your carbon footprint might be 200 tons, you know, you might be talking about several thousand dollars or even over 10,000 pounds, I should say, which is like a significant amount of money. Right. And then when you get scrutiny on the on what you've done with it,
00:14:27
Speaker
you gotta be careful. So yeah, there's a framework for sort of assessing carbon offset projects. And there's, as with the carbon neutral net zero piece and the definitions, there also isn't like complete agreement on offsets. So it's very difficult for people. So the approach that we've taken today is to have like a portfolio. So we're thinking about the risk to our customers
00:14:59
Speaker
So one could be about planting trees, another could be about renewable energy, one could be about like direct carbon capture from the air using some sort of like new technology.
00:15:15
Speaker
you're sort of like, you know, protecting yourself from some of the risks. Because like you said, it's like, and it has happened is someone, a big corporate spends a million pounds on, you know, building, planting a forest. And then five years later, it burns down, you know, there's a forest fire. So it's like, you know, then technically, you need to spend that money again, because it does take, you know,
00:15:43
Speaker
carbon offsets from planting trees is based on like the life of the tree. So tree lasts several decades, right? So if you burns down after five years, then you've got to do something about it. So it's a tough one. But yes, the tree one I find fascinating as far as there's a lot of stuff about it being very good and they've been good projects, but equally somewhere, finally a thousand trees have been planted and then three survived, you know, because they weren't properly looked after.
00:16:12
Speaker
and so on, so it must be a challenge finding the right projects and so on. You touched on people having different motivations for why they would do it, so whether it's internal or external and so on. What do you find when people are coming to you with the reasons that they are looking to do it? Is it a PR tool, or are there genuine reasons behind why they're looking to offset? It's a good question, and I think with all the people that we're working with and talking to,
00:16:41
Speaker
there is a desire to do good, to reduce the impact on the environment. But I think with most companies, if not all companies, they are still looking for an ROI.
00:16:57
Speaker
on this because it does require time and it does require money in order to one, understand what's going on in your business and then two, to do all this mitigation stuff that we talked about. There are costs involved, so people are trying to see like, okay, how can we get a return?
00:17:20
Speaker
And today, you know, it can be really, really powerful to your to your branding and your messaging to integrate into that carbon neutrality or some sort of net zero that's backed up by, you know, rigorous like calculations that you've done so that people can obviously
00:17:40
Speaker
what you've done. So we very much are seeing that like the individuals that we're talking to in the businesses, like they really care about this. And that's why we see this with a lot of founders of, you know, startups and SMEs that, you know, today that they are thinking about this like out of the gate, you know, from day one, they're thinking about, okay, how can we approach this in the right way, which is which is great.
00:18:08
Speaker
But even in those bigger organizations, the individuals are thinking and they really care, but they also are cognizant that the business needs to get a return because it is money that's going to have to be spent on this problem.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fair point. I think, I suppose my main motivation for doing it was just wanting to be consistent with, you know, if I'm washing out a tin can at home, putting it through a cycling bin, it's then pointless, completely, you know, mitigating that with bad practice at work. Yeah, for me, it was about being consistent with what we were doing personally, and then what we were doing as a business.
00:18:47
Speaker
What are the types of things that surveyors might not think about in terms of the types of things that are adding to their carbon costs as a business? I think the very obvious one might be driving a car to get to appointments. But what are the ones that probably don't think about as much?
Overlooked Carbon Cost Areas
00:19:04
Speaker
I think the big one that we see is technology that's being used. Because a lot of the news cycle around carbon is to do with manufacturing
00:19:19
Speaker
And we forget that there are, for every piece of technology that we're using, it's being hosted in a data center somewhere, and that's like a massive facility that's being air-cooled or water-cooled, and it's pumping out tons of heat, and it's tens of thousands of servers burning loads of energy for the electricity that they need.
00:19:46
Speaker
if we're spending a lot on...
00:19:49
Speaker
all the different software packages that we have, whilst if you've got a fleet of cars, it's not going to be as much. It's still going to be a contributing factor. And the bigger you get, obviously, the bigger that could be. So that's been a common one that we've seen. And I think more broadly, it's just like everything in your supply chain. So as a surveyor, if you're using
00:20:19
Speaker
I can't remember what the tools are, but you've got the setting out, the machines that will point the lasers to do the layout of a site and things like that.
00:20:34
Speaker
those pieces of equipment, they're produced in a factory. So very commonly when we talk to customers, they think about, okay, well, my carbon footprint comes from how I use this product, right? So it has a battery in it and I recharge the battery, okay, there's some electricity to use there.
00:20:53
Speaker
But that may only be over the life of that product, say 50% of its overall carbon footprint. The other 50% comes from basically extracting all of the metals and other materials that needed to go into making it, and then transporting them, and then actually assembling this piece of equipment
00:21:15
Speaker
that you're using every day in your job right when you go out on on site and that has that's what you call like an embodied carbon footprint because by the time you've got it all that carbon has already been expended but the way that carbon footprinting works is because you purchased it and you used it you know essentially that carbon was created by your choice right it was your choice
00:21:43
Speaker
your business, and therefore, that's why when it comes to carbon footprint reporting, you have to take accountability like for that impact. And that, you know, goes all the way back to the start, where I said it's about like, you know, it's about your supply chain, these other people that you're working with. So there are some of these ones that are like, I guess, less in your face than, you know, sticking petrol in the car and driving or, you know, heating and lighting your office. There's all these other impacts as well.
00:22:10
Speaker
I suppose two things from that. We have to make sure we're offsetting all of our podcast views as part of our carbon offsetting. Because it's true, a lot of what we're offsetting is data centers and computers in use for coding and all that kind of stuff. I think the other question I've got from that is if you're
00:22:29
Speaker
working on net zero where you're working with suppliers and customers to offset cost everything.
Understanding Double Counting
00:22:36
Speaker
Is there an element there where, and this probably isn't necessarily a bad thing, but where you've got sort of companies and I suppose offsetting the same thing, because the company that's made the product has offset the carbon cost there, but me as a business who's bought that, I'm then offsetting too, or does that happen there?
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, it absolutely does. And that is why you'll see some of the bigger companies, you know, just choosing not to offset these parts of their supply chain. You know, like if you can look up like Walmart, for example, I think they just buy
00:23:22
Speaker
And so from a cost perspective, they just cannot afford to pay for the offsets for that. So they will just do direct energy use for heating and cooling their facilities, and they'll do business travel. So it absolutely happens. And again, that goes back to the story that you want to tell. But the standards and where scrutiny is going is that
00:23:51
Speaker
you know, these impacts were caused because of as a consequence of a decision that you made in your business, right? So if you didn't buy those products, it reduces demand, and that would ultimately reduce production of those products. And so, you know, carbon release would be reduced. But like
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah, there's this thing called like double counting and the actual standards of like the work that we've done, you know, with survey book or on your carbon footprint is split into three sections. You've got scope one, scope two and scope three. Scope one is like,
00:24:29
Speaker
basically like direct energy use in facilities and vehicles that you own. So like putting petrol in the car and running your car, that's scope one. Scope two is electricity for the office. And then scope three is everything else in your supply chain. And then it's how your customers use your own products. And so by the very nature of that, all of that's double counted.
00:24:51
Speaker
as is your electricity in scope two, right? Because they're going to go into the details too much. So it's designed to be all sort of like double counted, like from a measurement perspective. The reason for that and what's neat about it is it means that you pick any position in the supply chain or the value chain, you can see all the emissions if you've done it well, all the emissions that came before and all the emissions that come after.
00:25:23
Speaker
it's designed, but that builds in double counting. And then the other half of the problem is like double spend, which is where, okay, do we offset that impact?
00:25:33
Speaker
And that really is a decision for the business to take. So if you want to be a leader in the space, then it's a very simple decision to just offset the entirety of scope three. But what it also does is it helps encourage you to look at, okay, how can we change our behavior?
00:25:56
Speaker
How can we change the decisions that we're making can we work with our suppliers to see if like there's a different piece of equipment that is a much like less carbon intensive manufacturing process or something right and ultimately.
00:26:13
Speaker
the way it's designed is so that you start talking to certain key suppliers and you put pressure on them. And then when all their other customers are also putting pressure on them, obviously there's enough for them to make a change and then produce less carbon in the first place. And then I guess the final thing to say on it is it's really, really difficult because of the nature of how complicated a supply chain is.
00:26:43
Speaker
who is responsible for like what bit of carbon that's been released? Like if you're buying like a piece of equipment or you buy a car, right? Is it, you know, the Toyota that's responsible or is it like the thousand different suppliers that they have? And then those suppliers also have a thousand suppliers. So like, you know, one of the things that we're working on a consequence is a way to package up
00:27:11
Speaker
the carbon emissions and then to be able to share that up and down supply chains so that you can drive true accountability and transparency in the supply chain so that when you do come to purchasing offsets, you can say, I know for a fact that these impacts were offset and so we're not going to spend
00:27:40
Speaker
that cash that we're saving, maybe we're going to reinvest that in more reduction strategies that we're working on, taking trains rather than flying or something. Maybe that even has an increased cost. So yeah, no easy answers to these ones, Matt.
00:27:58
Speaker
I don't think there's an easy answer to many things around this.
Advice for SMEs on Carbon Impact
00:28:04
Speaker
There's a lot of nuances and complexities to it, but I suppose, as you said, it's about at least starting somewhere and making small steps to begin with. On that note, then, if you are an SME,
00:28:18
Speaker
What are the first things you can do to start, I suppose, reducing your impact or offsetting? Because I suppose you're driving a car fine, you're using your iPad and your phone when you're out on site and your laptop when you're back home. You've got your tools like your laser scanners and thermal imaging cameras and drones and stuff like that.
00:28:40
Speaker
with all of that going on, I don't know, customers as well reading reports on their phones and stuff. What are the steps that surveyors can take to potentially start to mitigate that or at least reduce the impact? Yeah, it's a great question and it's a really difficult one to answer. I think, you know, what it requires, you know, is
00:29:05
Speaker
to actually like measure what's happening. Because everyone, we do sort of like know broadly, like, okay, it's probably going to be the vehicles, it's probably going to be, you know, some of the equipment that we're using, it's going to be like running the office. And, you know, maybe that's going to be the biggest parts of a surveyor's impact. I mean, the first thing I recommend if people are, you know, serious about it is actually
00:29:34
Speaker
doing calculations so that you can really get an insight into what's going on, because it might surprise you.
00:29:44
Speaker
once you've got the data and you're tracking the data obviously that allows you to like make decisions and if you're doing it blind it's like super difficult and that's where like once you've got the data you know your business and you know what's practical and you can talk to suppliers and things and then you can sort of like make plans if you don't track any of the data
00:30:07
Speaker
then all you can ever do is have a very high-level conversation about, hey, I think probably if we drove the vehicle fleet less, then it would reduce emissions. But how are you going to do that as a business? Because that's what's driving top line as well. You've got to get out to site. But it may be, certainly with medium to larger organizations where you're going to conferences and things,
00:30:37
Speaker
Like if you, you know, like the average carbon footprint of a person in the UK every year is like roughly 10 tons, let's say. And then if you fly like return to Los Angeles from London and you do it business class, you're going to be, you know, roughly
00:31:00
Speaker
for tons, just for one flight. So if you're going to a conference somewhere and you're flying five or 10 salespeople there, obviously that can have then a huge influence on the overall carbon footprint in the business and massively outweigh everything else. But if you look at professional services firms,
00:31:22
Speaker
Like, you look at like big four and just everyone, typically business travel is over 80% of the carbon footprint of that business, right? So that might be one sort of like practical way. So what do companies do? They start traveling by train rather than flying. They try and do more stuff remote.
00:31:48
Speaker
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of sexy ways of reducing your carbon footprint. It does require behavior change, and some of that stuff can be a bit painful.
00:31:58
Speaker
I think, yeah, that's a very good point on the data side because you can have things that might be more obvious in terms of the things, the bigger things that you're aware of, but there are lots of little things you'll do that you don't realise how much they're adding up, but not only from a cost, general cost perspective, but if you don't know the actual carbon cost of each activity, then you don't know which one's having the actual biggest carbon impacts rather than, you might think it's one thing that could be completely different. And then you focus on the wrong area. I mean, what one controversial thing, Matt,
00:32:27
Speaker
can be controversial and something that I believe absolutely is like, you know, right now I'm I'm and I can see like, you know, challenges on both sides. It's a little bit controversial. So I drive around in like, I mean, I live I live in Austin, Texas, for one thing. So I drive around in quite a large vehicle. It's like a Nissan Pathfinder. I think the engine is like a four litre engine. It's like a V10.
00:32:55
Speaker
I think it does like, you know, 14 miles to the gallon or something. Right. So it's like not very fuel efficient. Um, but it's like a 15 year old car as well. And, um, so obviously there's a, there's a lot of, uh, you know, noise out there saying, Hey, you know, and there's a lot of businesses like doing this where they replace their vehicle fleet with fully electric or hybrid vehicles. Right. Um,
00:33:23
Speaker
But we had the example of the piece of surveying equipment that 50% of its carbon footprint was from manufacturing it. Hey, guess what? It's the same with running a car because it's a highly complex thing that you're buying. And it has a massive supply chain where stuff's been shipped all over the world and being dug out of the ground. And that has a carbon footprint.
00:33:50
Speaker
So that's why I still run around with that car. But when I buy the next car, when I'm going to replace it, that's when I would look at an electric vehicle or a hybrid vehicle because that is going to be on balance versus
00:34:09
Speaker
engine car going to have like a lower impact. So I think that's like, obviously something that's more medium long term for businesses, but as they like look at their fleets and look at renewing them, right, you can look at hybrid and electric vehicles as one way of, you know, reducing
00:34:27
Speaker
It's funny you bring up that point, because I've been having the same conversation actually around here with Euless, which is planning to expand. And so where I am at the moment, a lot of the cars will no longer meet the standards, and therefore will have to be, obviously, had to pay for each day or get rid of it. And then there's been that whole debate as to, is that better for the environment? Yes, slightly cleaner out here.
00:34:51
Speaker
But you've now got to scrap that car, so there's a carbon cost of the machinery and processes to scrap it, plus build a new car just to be slightly more efficient on carbon when you're driving. And it's very hard to make that decision, should you actually just wait a bit longer because it's better for the environment overall just to get more use out of what's already been produced, or do you switch over to something
Forecasting Carbon Impact with Data
00:35:13
Speaker
else? But on that note, if you're looking to try and make changes, I suppose a lot of what we've looked at so far is reactive in terms of
00:35:21
Speaker
you get the data in, then you react to what you're seeing, and then you go and make a change. If you're looking to do things next, and therefore the more proactive element, is there data you can look at to see the impact of the potential purchase you're going to make? Is it easy to find that data, or is that all quite difficult?
00:35:36
Speaker
The nice thing is that you can do it using the same reference data because the way that carbon measurement works is you take a piece of input data, which is like I drove 10 miles.
00:35:51
Speaker
or I use 10 litres of petrol, and then there's a piece of reference data that says 10 miles is equivalent to this much carbon, or 10 litres of petrol is equivalent to this much carbon. They call them emissions factors.
00:36:07
Speaker
you can use those same pieces of reference data to do like forecasting as well, right? So you could be saying, okay, well, if I'm about to buy the vehicle fleet, I'm going to buy 10 vans, okay, I could run them, these all electric hybrid, this is how we expect
00:36:31
Speaker
And then in a system like consequence and many others, you use the same reference data that you would for historical reporting to like go, okay, hey, what's going to happen in the future? And then that can help you then make a decision before it's actually happened. And is it possible to do that with other things like the type of software you're using or the type of tool you might want to buy or is it getting a bit too complex there?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, the availability of data is way harder in that space. Because certainly in software, a lot of the time, what you're looking at is a piece of reference data that's based on an average.
00:37:18
Speaker
comparing one piece of software to another, you'd be using the same average reference data and so you can't differentiate. Some of the work that we've done is working with the major companies around the world
00:37:35
Speaker
understand their carbon footprints and use that to generate reference data that would allow you to like compare, right? We're gonna use, I'm trying to think of a piece of software like Zoom versus like Google Meet or something, right? And it would allow you to look at, okay, if I spent a hundred pounds with Google, if I spent a hundred pounds with Google,
00:37:58
Speaker
Zoom you know to actually see a different impact on those two decisions that you could make so a lot of that ultimately means that you're looking at the suppliers. Data.
00:38:12
Speaker
Right. And that is where that can become very difficult because it's not easy to find. It's not accessible. Sometimes when you find it, it's not in a format that you can understand. You know, I have a team that works full time on researching, you know, doing quality assurance checks on and then building this reference data from companies all around the world.
00:38:39
Speaker
So we look at their carbon footprint reports, we check that they are of a good enough quality, and then we build them into these reference data that gets used when we do calculations for customers. So no silver bullet there, but there are ways. And what we found is the longer that companies are actually tracking their emissions and looking at dashboards that have real data in,
00:39:06
Speaker
that new solutions and new ideas of what you can do will come to
Using Historical Data for Future Decisions
00:39:13
Speaker
you. If you're not measuring it, then you're just never going to be able to do anything about it. But if you start, then you can start making those incremental steps. You'll probably start with the really easy things like looking at energy. And that goes to driving behavior changes in the office, turning off all equipment,
00:39:34
Speaker
actually have a material impact over the course of a year, changing commuting habits for your staff. Some of those things are like the low hanging fruit, but as you're tracking all the data, you can start to see more insightful things that you could do that might take a bit more effort and are a bit more complicated as well. And so that's why when you're looking at the data, it is backwards looking, but
00:40:01
Speaker
based on that, you know, you know your business and you know that like, typically you're running it the same way next year, right? So you can use it for forward looking decision making, like before these things have actually occurred. So it can still be really helpful for that. Yeah. So there's a couple of interesting bits there. There's a simple things you can do in terms of like turning the lights off before you leave and, um,
00:40:24
Speaker
you know maybe even changing when you go to work so you go before rush hour or after rush hour so you're not sat in traffic and burning fuel but one of the things you touched on there was you have a team of people that look through all the data and you know calculate everything. I know at the moment we offset 150% of our carbon usage that we've calculated just to be safe whilst we're building up an accurate picture but
00:40:47
Speaker
How do you ensure that the calculations that are being made can be relied upon? They're accurate or accurate as you can be? Yes, that's a great question. And I think it's supported by there being a global standard. And so we build our software in compliance with that global standard. And the way that the standard is designed is it does actually give you flexibility. So there are multiple ways of calculating the carbon footprint
00:41:18
Speaker
office and that flexibility is there because everyone knows that people have a different ability to get access to the data right based on the type of company and the type of activity so what we always say to our clients is it's about thinking about the claim that you're making right in terms of is it public is it internal is it carbon neutral is it net zero like you know
00:41:44
Speaker
what are you using it for in terms of like are you using it very strongly as like a sales and marketing tool because all of that reflects on the scrutiny that you're gonna get and therefore the detail and the accuracy that you need to go to. With a system like consequence,
00:42:02
Speaker
we'll work at all levels of accuracy. And so, you know, one of the things that you might do is do like an initial calculation that's more high level, it's faster, it costs you less to get the results. And then you'd be able to identify, okay, here are certain spots in our carbon footprint that are very, very impactful. And those are ones where you wanna spend more time and more effort and more investment
00:42:30
Speaker
to collect more data. Like we've done, you know, looking at how a customer of a software company uses their product, the energy use profile of that product, right? Because it's sort of a bit of a black hole. And then actually doing like energy calculations based on that, which is like, from a standards perspective is like in full compliance with what you have to do.
00:42:58
Speaker
So mitigating at 150%, as you're saying, though, is like this extra step that you can take to safeguard yourself, both in the short and the long term, honestly, because there's always
Uncertainties in Carbon Calculations
00:43:13
Speaker
uncertainty. There's both uncertainty in the data that you're collecting, right, especially as your business grows, is your entire team, you know, actually tracking the amount of fuel that's getting used when they're driving their car or
00:43:26
Speaker
When you're doing the commute, do you actually know the distance that they're traveling? There are all these parameters and things. There's a lot of information. So you're trying to make it easy, right? So there's some uncertainty there.
00:43:38
Speaker
And then the reference data that you're using to convert it into a carbon footprint is also based on lots of different, you know, calculations that were done by scientists to go with all that different type of data that you're using. So there's always, there is uncertainty, it's inherent in the process. And so I guess I was like leaving advice for people, like even companies that have spent
00:44:02
Speaker
hundreds of thousands of pounds a year on doing their carbon footprints often build in a buffer when it comes to mitigation because of this uncertainty and that's why building the story I think is so important because even if you make a mistake or you know you do a calculation incorrectly you underestimate something
00:44:27
Speaker
If you're building a story around it and you're putting your foot forward in the right direction, you know, what we found is that people will tend to be more forgiving of that, you know, versus being opaque about what you're doing, not bothering to tell a story and then people finding errors and then obviously like, you know, you can have, you can have issues there. So, um,
00:44:51
Speaker
our software takes standards, puts it into code. So you can't do any fiddling around with how calculations are done. So it's very trustworthy for our customers to know. It's going to be done repeatedly, accurately. And then there is that decision that you make around mitigation and just adding a bit of padding in just to take account for the very likely uncertainty that
00:45:23
Speaker
This is more of an engineering task that you're going through. Yeah, no, that makes sense. So I suppose my final question, maybe slightly putting you on the spot before we go, is if someone wants to get started with this, what are the top tips for you don't know where to begin and how to get into it?
Automating Carbon Management
00:45:42
Speaker
If it was me, I would find a software platform that's going to automate as much of the work as possible.
00:45:54
Speaker
The calculations, like there's all these methodologies and things, they're very long. They can be quite confusing. What you want to do or what I would want to do is I want to focus on building my business. So I want to find someone that has a software platform that's going to make this easy for me. And I want to look at something where I can get quick wins. So bringing in data that I hold centrally,
00:46:24
Speaker
For example, from my finance team, because they've already done all this work on formatting it and reconciling it and noting it, notating it. Can I bring that into a system that gives me a very, very quick picture of what's going on in my business, in my carbon footprint? And then based on that, I can then start making some decisions around what I want to do, including what my
00:46:48
Speaker
next steps will be, right? So I would just say like get stuck in. I think you can get started a lot quicker than people think and get to that point, you know, within a couple of weeks of starting even faster than that. And then you can look at, you know, going into more detail on those like really impactful
00:47:13
Speaker
Or based on your goal, you might choose not to do that at all. But at least you're tracking something and you have an idea of what's going on in the business. So I think consequence is a software platform. So I'm sort of plugging it there. But even if you didn't work with consequence, I think a software platform is the right way to go. Because the last thing you want is to be going back
00:47:41
Speaker
emails with consultants or hiring people internally to solve this problem. I think it can be solved for a minimal investment in time and money using a software platform.
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I'm not getting paid at all to plug consequence, but I agree it was super. For us, it was very easy to get started. It was very easy to, I don't have to do much each month, maybe upload the sats and stuff and then the dashboard gets updated and the offsets are provided and all that kind of stuff. So super easy, but as you say, check out any of them, but I certainly would say, yeah, you're right. It's easy to get started.
00:48:20
Speaker
But yeah, thanks for coming on today and sharing your insights. If anyone wants to get in touch with you, how do they do that? Yeah, best place to go is to the website, so that's consequence.world, and you can get in contact with us there. You can find this on LinkedIn. Again, search for consequence.world on that. Those are two best places to find us. Perfect. Thanks again and speak soon. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it.