The experts' introduction to carbon calculating

The past few years have seen a boom in carbon calculating technologies designed to help businesses, governments and individuals tackle their carbon footprint. But what exactly do these calculators do? How does it apply to my business? And where is this incredibly active sector heading next?

To answer these questions we reached out to three carbon calculating companies we know well: Foodsteps , Green Pixie and Zevero. All of them work to help businesses better track, understand and reduce their emissions – but with their own distinct specialities.

How does your product help businesses in your space reach their sustainability goals?

Foodsteps: Reaching sustainable business goals is a lot more complex and labour heavy than some people think, and that can become more nuanced when measuring your food's environmental impact with a focus to reduce.

Foodsteps is a data reporting and measuring platform that enables restaurants, brands and retailers to track and reduce the footprint of food from farm to fork. Our service pulls from our database of the environmental impacts of food use and life-cycle assessment data on carbon footprint. From our experience, when a food business needs to cut emissions and impact, it’s not just about ingredients and recipes. You need to look at packaging, transportation, cooking and food waste.

Knowing this we’ve streamlined all this data in one place.

We’ve also produced an automated carbon labelling feature for our customers, so once they have an accurate carbon rating for their recipes or products, they can then efficiently communicate that product's impact rating to the customer.

Data is crucial to any food business wanting to efficiently and accurately lower its impact, so we’ve put a lot of time and effort into producing a world-class database comprised of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies alongside our primary research. Our database is also independently reviewed by academic and industry experts.

Green Pixie: Sustainability goals depend on accurate information. Without good-quality data, how can you begin to reduce or offset your emissions?

Any business attempting to hit Net Zero, for example, fundamentally relies on a complete (and reliable) report of its emissions, so it can balance the books with initiatives like green investments and carbon removal, to ultimately achieve net zero carbon output. Cloud emissions (carbon emissions from cloud computing) are a type of carbon emission that 74% of enterprises will have, but less than 1% have any accurate data on them. For some businesses, particularly those in the tech space, cloud emissions might be 50% of their total carbon footprint - and they can’t measure them! This information black hole is a massive threat to their sustainability goals.

Our product measures cloud emissions accurately and reliably with a leading, consistent methodology which can be trusted and defended.

Zevero: We go into the nitty gritty of emission calculation to comprehensively calculate emissions. This means when it comes to reductions, we can show companies exactly what they need to do to hit their goals. Without that ‘nitty gritty’ it becomes challenging for companies to know what to do.
We really focus on making the calculation task as simple as possible for companies to take the burden off their hands. We do this by focusing on a specific sector and automating all data collection and calculations.

What are the key criteria you’d recommend businesses start with when calculating their carbon?



Foodsteps: We recommend looking at areas you can gather enough information and data on. Often food businesses will have a north-star idea of how they want to cut carbon, but without enough understanding on where the main sources of carbon come from, you can be just clutching at straws.

But some key areas we’d recommend are:

Farming practises - how is your food grown, and what practises are they using?

Cooking and preparation - often a large environmental impact can be avoided by changing how we cook and prepare our food. For example, what oils do they use, is the stove gas or electric? How old is the fridge or freezer?

If you can, look at your Scope 3 emissions - these are often the ones which leak the most carbon, but historically, these emissions can be tricky to pinpoint - purchased goods and services (category 1).

Our Science team recently collaborated with WRAP on helping to make Scope 3 emissions in food easier to track, report and measure, so we hope this will help more businesses in the long run.

But it’s worth noting this can be different for each business.

Green Pixie: It's important to take a holistic approach to carbon calculating, leaving no stone unturned. It's amazing how some forms of emission can be totally left out of carbon calculations - leading to massive underreporting. To achieve this, it's key to remember scope 3 emissions - i.e. your indirect emissions. In the modern era, these are very significant. It will soon be legally mandatory to include scope 3 emissions in reporting, and those that are already doing so have realised what a difference it makes. Taking the time to accurately measure scope 3 emissions will usually reveal a much higher - and more accurate - carbon total. It's vital not to ignore this.

Zevero: To have buy-in from leadership. Reducing your greenhouse gas emissions takes resources and is not an overnight tick-box exercise. This means a company will need time from different departments, financial input to decarbonise and hard decisions for systemic changes in conducting business. All of these points become substantially harder when you are banging your head against a brick wall to try and get things over the line.

What excites you about working in carbon calculating? And where do you see the technology going in the next ten years?

Foodsteps: Hard to find a quick answer but this industry is growing every year. The most exciting thing is that many of us and fellow food-tech companies are working towards a centralised and standarised way of measuring and tracking impact across the life cycle of food. This means it’s collaborative, and we’re all working towards one goal, which will (hopefully) help us solve this challenge in front of us.

In ten years I think that the technology may evolve into more ways and easier ways of drilling down into accurate data.

I hope to see more services like ours helping industries measure their impact more accurately.

We’re at a fascinating point in tech adoption that I can see a world where the average person has super accurate data analytics for their own carbon emissions on their phones - so Steve could see his heart rate, how many steps he’s taken and how much carbon his day has produced.

Green Pixie: Carbon calculation is integral to Net Zero goals around the world. Businesses need to understand their contributions to global carbon emissions - and be held responsible for combating them. In an increasingly digitised world, we must accept that carbon emissions do not end with delivery vans and office heating - there are many hidden emissions, most notably in the digital sphere, which require nuanced, complex and sophisticated measurement techniques. It excites me that we get to use technical skills within the digital world to solve this problem, creating software that accurately and reliably measures complicated forms of carbon emissions, such as those from cloud computing.

Zevero: Always excited about what is to come. We as a company have a great potential to really help companies save thousands of hours of time in calculations and to give them the exact knowledge of pathways they need to get to net zero.

Also, there are a lot of interesting things still in the R&D phase of tech and sustainability and excited to see the potential of AI and various hardware that will be game-changing in and out of our industry!

I think it is pretty unanimous in our industry that technology will be the future. It will be able to learn, predict, compare and automate to give companies the most accurate data to make decisions.

It's going to be a big change. I don’t know exactly how big so I will see what Chat GPT says:

Input:
“How big will the change be in the technology carbon accounting market in the next 10 years”

Output:
“It is difficult to predict exactly how the technology carbon accounting market will change in the next 10 years, but it is likely that the demand for technology that helps organizations measure and reduce their carbon emissions will continue to grow. There are a number of factors that could contribute to this trend, including increasing regulatory pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, growing consumer demand for environmentally-friendly products and services, and increasing awareness of the role that businesses can play in addressing climate change.

One of the main drivers of change in the technology carbon accounting market is likely to be the adoption of new technologies and practices that enable organizations to more accurately measure and track their carbon emissions. For example, the development of new sensors and monitoring systems that can be used to measure emissions from industrial processes or transportation systems could help companies to more accurately assess their carbon footprint and identify opportunities for improvement.

There may also be a greater focus on the development of software and other tools that help companies to analyze and manage their carbon emissions data. For example, companies may turn to artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to help them identify patterns in their carbon emissions data and identify potential areas for improvement.

Overall, it is likely that the technology carbon accounting market will continue to evolve and grow in the coming years, as more and more organizations look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and meet increasingly strict environmental regulations.”

About our experts

Foodsteps | https://foodsteps.earth
Food creates 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is the biggest cause of biodiversity loss. Our platform enables restaurants, brands and retailers to track and reduce the footprint of food from farm to fork.

Green Pixie | www.greenpixie.com
Equipped with Greenpixie’s cloud emissions data, companies can take control of their carbon footprint, enabling cost savings and emissions reduction.

Zevero | https://www.zevero.earth/
Zevero makes it easy for companies to measure, monitor, reduce and report on their carbon emissions.

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