Carbon Trust Standard

We are dedicated to working with our clients to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and we are equally committed to continuing to reduce our own environmental impact and carbon footprint.

We are a small, fully owned subsidiary of the Carbon Trust and operate from the Carbon Trust’s main offices in New Street Square, London. As a result we have adopted the Carbon Trust Group environment policies and contribute to achieving the Carbon Trust’s overall environmental targets. You can read about the Carbon Trust Group environmental report here.

We also have our own specific plan to measure, manage and reduce our impact.

Summary

The Carbon Trust Standard Company is committed to reducing its impact on the environment, but as a young and growing company our overall footprint is growing in absolute terms as our operations expand and we increase our headcount. We also measure our footprint relative to our output – the number of organisations certified to the Standard – and we track emissions per completed certification in order to assess the overall efficiency of our operations and our relative performance improvement. This improvement in efficiency can clearly been seen in the following table which compares our recent 2009/10 footprint to that of our first year, 2008/09. Whilst our total footprint has increased by almost 30% our emissions per certification have declined by around 50%:

Reducing Our Impact

The Carbon Trust Standard Company has already taken a number of actions to further understand and minimise our footprint. These include:

• Continuing to reduce business travel through webinars and phone conferences rather than face-to-face meetings.
• Using electronic documents and e-signatures for proposals, reducing paper and postage.
• Automated monitoring of the electricity usage of individual desks within the Carbon Trust offices and individual printing. This encourages employee awareness, and enables remote control of desktops to minimise energy wastage.
• Improve the tracking of assessor travel to more accurately calculate the carbon impact of each assessment.
• Improved assessor selection for each customer, placing priority on proximity.

Into the future, we have identified a number of additional actions to measure our impact more accurately and to become more carbon efficient:

• Implement a system to track and apportion emissions associated with fugitive refrigerant leakage from the London office’s air conditioning and refrigerant systems.
• Further reducing business travel through use of webinars.
• Incorporating carbon considerations in procurement criteria.

Detailed Discussion

Calculation

The financial year 2009/10 is our second year of operation. We have calculated our carbon footprint from 01 April 2009 to 31 March 2010. The footprint has been calculated according to the GHG protocol, using 2009 DEFRA emission factors. The organisational boundary of the footprint was defined using the operational control approach. The operational boundary of the footprint includes all scope 1 and scope 2 emissions. We have also chosen to include some significant scope 3 emission sources within the footprint. Other scope 3 emissions have been excluded as they are either less material, or not possible to calculate at this time. Our measurement goes beyond the requirements of the Carbon Trust Standard, as we choose to report our Level 1 and Level 2 footprint.

Scope

Scope 1 emissions

The Carbon Trust Standard Company has no scope 1 emissions as we do not have operational control over any fuel combustion and do not own any vehicles. Our London offices are heated by a gas-fired system operated by our landlord and shared with other tenants. Emissions associated with this system are included under scope 2 emissions.

Scope 2 emissions

The company has indirect, scope 2 emissions associated with our occupancy of space in the Carbon Trust Group London office. Our emissions arise from electricity use and imported heating and cooling. We have calculated the footprint for which we are responsible by allocating a proportion of the overall building emissions to our operations based on headcount.

Scope 3 emissions

Due to our business model, the Carbon Trust Standard Company has a significant footprint associated with the activities of our suppliers, employee travel, and employee commuting. We have considered the range of likely scope 3 emissions and have estimated those emissions that we consider to be material and quantifiable. These are:

• Our use of outsourced delivery partners to manage aspects of our service. Estimates of these emissions are based on electricity and fuel use by our partners.
• Our use of independent assessors who travel to clients’ sites to conduct Carbon Trust Standard assessments. These emissions are based on an estimate of assessor travel per assessment.
• Our business travel. These emissions estimates are based on employee expenses.
• Our staff commuting. Emissions estimates are based on a staff survey.
• Emissions associated with the estate management of our London offices. Estimates of these emissions are calculated by allocating a proportion of overall estate emissions based on headcount.

Other sources of scope 3 emissions associated with our activities which we have excluded from this footprint are:

• Emissions associated with fugitive emissions of refrigerant gases from the cooling system in our London office.
• Emissions associated with our use of paper and other office resources.
• Emissions associated with the disposal of waste from our offices.
• Emissions associated with our use of outsourced IT services.
• Other emissions associated with our supply chain.

These sources were excluded as we are currently unable to measure their associated emissions. These exclusions adversely impact the certainty of our footprint report and we will look to improve our data for these sources going forward.