What does Carbon Friendly stand for?
A Carbon Friendly business:
- has documented their carbon footprint for the past 12 months using their own datasets,
- underwent a review of the documentation by an accredited organisation – we use the NZ based company Ekos,
- used an officially recognised CO2 calculator to work out the CO2 emissions and
- has offset their carbon emissions with official certificates.
Our Carbon footprint is measured for the past 12 months, starting from when we were first certified in 2019. Our current measuring period goes from 15 March 2022 to 14 March 2023. As part of our analysis for the last period we reported:
Electricity Consumption: 1,330kwh – 0.19 Tonnes CO2
Waste: 60kg – 0.111 Tonnes of CO2 (we established a waste reduction program right at the start)
Company Vehicle: 7,095kms – 2.106 Tonnes CO2
Travel (flights, accommodation, rental cars): 1.964 Tonnes CO2
Inward Freight: air freight – 0.014 Tonnes CO2
Outward Freight: air and road freight – 0.05 Tonnes CO2
Total: 4.43 Tonnes of CO2
How do we compare to others?
Our total annual carbon footprint of 4.43 tonnes is equivalent to the CO2 emissions of a standard family car per year.
According to the Trees 4 Life calculator 1 tree offsets 1 tonne of CO2. So we need about 4.5 trees to offset our emissions.
We actually plant lots of trees each year as part of our eco-restoring work when we do track maintenance on site, but these are not “certified” trees. We therefore bought certified carbon offset credits which help establishing new forests around New Zealand and the Pacific.
Our next steps!
The Carbon Friendly certification is a low entry level certification for very small businesses like ours.
The process for the last year has given us valuable insight in how to track our activities in order to achieve the ISO certified Climate Positive status for 2024. That status means our business will remove CO2 from the atmosphere and together with all our customers we will make the world a better place.
With that knowledge we will then actively seek to reduce our CO2 emissions.
