Blackmores ISO Consultancy Service: The creators of isology®

Today, we’re joined by our resident Carbonologist David Algar to discuss the seven vital steps to Carbonology.

If you’re looking for a sustainability roadmap for your business and looking to address the climate emergency while also meeting your stakeholders needs you’re in the right place.

Over the last 2 episodes, Carbonoloigst David Algar and Mel have been going through ISO 14064 the Carbon Verification Standard and PAS 2060 the Carbon Neutrality Standard.

Today, David and Mel will be explaining how you can meet the requirements of both standards, gain verification, and demonstrate your business as carbon neutral.

That’s all going to be based on our game-changing route to sustainability, Carbonology.

What makes Carbonolgy unique is rather than paying lip service to the climate change emergency, Carbonolgy provides a proven methodology for sustainable success, allowing businesses to become carbon neutral and to achieve ISO standards successfully.

You’ll learn

• The seven steps of carbonology.
• How to achieve carbon neutrality.
• Why it’s cheaper to reduce your emissions rather than offset them.
• The importance of re-quantifying carbon emissions.
• How to prove you’ve offset your emissions.
• How becoming carbon neutral can benefit your shareholders.

Resources

• Carbonology

In this episode, we talk about:

[03:12] The seven steps of Carbonology to achieve carbon neutrality.

[7:54] The different options there are to verify that you are carbon neutral.

[9:07] The different areas you need to define when starting off in your Carbonology journey.

[11:45] How to quantify the emissions embedded in different products that you sell.

[14:22] What’s included in a Carbon Footprint Management Plan.

[16:50] The importance of including working from home in your scope 3 emissions.

[17:57] How long a reduction period last and what it involves.

[19:27] The benefits of re-quantification and how it works.

[21:14] How offsetting works as part of Carbonology.

[23:31] How making a declaration of achievement of neutrality works.

If you’d like a quote for Carbonology – Contact us!

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Today, we’re joined by our resident Carbonologist David Algar who shares with us everything he knows about the Carbon Neutrality Standard PAS 2060.

Customers are demanding more environmentally friendly products and services, and to remain competitive organizations need to reduce their emissions and improve their environmental records.

Having a sustainability roadmap is critical to both government and industry now and in the future.

When implementing effective climate change mitigation measures the ability to differentiate between real and false claims of carbon neutrality is absolutely critical.

If you’re looking for a credible roadmap for your sustainability journey PAS 2060 can help you cut through the cynicism and doubt and maintain trust in your ethics to manage and reduce your greenhouse gas emissions.

You’ll learn

• How to make a positive impact on the environment.
• Why a company can never be net carbon zero.
• What PAS 2060 consists of and how it helps businesses quantify and reduce emissions.
• How to build credibility and confidence with your shareholders.
• What Carbonology is and how it can help businesses become carbon neutral.
• Why it’s so important to quantify your emissions before reducing them.

Resources

• Blackmores – PAS 2060
• Carbonologyhub

In this episode, we talk about:

[02:13] What PAS 2060 is and how it assists companies to become carbon neutral.

[2:55] The difference between being ‘net carbon zero’ and ‘carbon neutrality’.

[3:48] The importance of quantifying and reducing your emissions.

[4:18] What carbon offsetting is and how it works.

[6:54] The main benefits for a business in adopting PAS 2060.

[7:46] What a carbon footprint management plan is and how it can help save money.

[8:50] The benefits of validating your carbon neutrality.

[10:20] How Carbonology can help businesses become carbon neutral.

If you need assistance with implementing PAS 2060 – Contact us!

We’d love to hear your views and comments about the ISO Show, here’s how:

• Share the ISO Show on Twitter or Linkedin
• Leave an honest review on iTunes or Soundcloud. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one.

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If businesses aren’t talking about COVID-19, they are discussing how to become carbon neutral.

To show their commitment to protecting the environment, companies are often claiming to be carbon neutral, but the issue is…where is the actual proof? Where is the credible framework that demonstrates carbon verification?

Today we’re excited to share how to get started with introducing ISO 14064 (the carbon footprint verification standard). So, if you’re looking for a sustainability roadmap for your business and are wondering where to begin, then you’re in luck as we’re going to be providing you with information on that over the next couple of podcasts! We’re delighted to be joined by David Algar, our resident Carbonologist at Blackmores, over the next few podcasts as he’s going to share with you information about the international standards that everybody’s talking about when it comes to demonstrating your carbon neutrality. This includes ISO 14064 for carbon footprint verification and PAS 2060 on carbon neutrality.

So, in this episode, let’s kick off with ISO 14064 and find out what’s it all about!

What you’ll learn:

• What is ISO 14064?
• What are upstream and downstream emissions?
• Certification methods
• Benefits of ISO 14064
• How Carbonology helps meet ISO 14064 requirements

ISO 14064 is a specification with guidance at the organisational level for the quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and their removals. So, essentially, ISO 14064 is a standard for an organisation of any type, size, quantity, or location globally to quantify its emissions of greenhouse gases, with the end product of this being the creation of a greenhouse gas inventory.

Now, let’s find out where we would begin with ISO 14064…

In ISO 14064, the standard begins with defining  the organisational boundaries and the reporting boundaries. So essentially what you’re covering in your greenhouse gas inventory and what the reporting boundaries are. This will also include any exclusions you decide to make i.e. elements of your business that will not be have their associated GHGs quantified.

An organisation embarking on its sustainability roadmap could carve out part of the business. So, for example by year one the UK operations, and then have a roadmap in place so that they include other locations and services as time goes on.

David expands on the greenhouse gas inventory by highlighting that this is where you would document all your emission sources. So, they are divided up into scope one, scope two, and scope three sources. Scope one is the direct ones, so for example stationary or mobile combustion, or anything your organisation directly burns. Then it goes into scope two, which is your purchased energy (the electricity, steam, heating and cooling that you would use in the building that you own or lease). Finally going into scope three can be a bit more complicated. This would be your other indirect sources, upstream and downstream. For example, if you are a manufacturing company, the upstream emissions would be the emissions associated with activities, for example, before your products are delivered to your manufacturing or warehouse. So that would include the extraction of the raw materials, the processing, packaging, and then the transport and distribution. The upstream emissions associated with a vehicle, for example, include putting it in a cargo ship and shipping it across the world. So, once  it leaves your warehouse or plant, it would then go off to the customer. This is where you are looking at the downstream emissions, including emissions associated with the product’s use

The greenhouse gas inventory does split the scopes up for you, so you don’t have to worry about memorising every single little part of the scopes! It is very useful in that aspect and it lays it out in a list for you.

Let’s take a quick dive into the vertification options for ISO 14064…

If you do decide to go for a third-party vertification from a certification board, the chances are that they’re going to ask you questions on why you decided to include and exclude certain things within your greenhouse gas inventories. For example, certain operations in your business or why you have made certain exclusions. Another key element of producing greenhouse gas inventories is that you must use emission factors. These are how you quantify and convert, for example kilowatts, into tonnes of Co² equivalent. So, the certification body may ask you why you’ve chosen to use a certain metric. That’s why it would always be a very good idea to document these choices, as you may be asked about them. So, in essence, this provides complete transparency on your carbon emissions across the organisation because you’ve justified the reason for including or excluding them.

Now, moving on to some of the benefits of ISO 14064…

Because it’s an ISO standard and internationally recognised, it provides a reliable and proven framework for quantifying your emissions. So as a result of this, this helps identify individual sources of emissions and enables you to identify the biggest source of emissions, energy usage, and vehicle usage. Therefore, you can use it to identify areas for improvement by setting targets. However, the result of going down this road is that once you’ve implemented those improvements, it can actually save you costs in many instances, for instance through lower energy usage.

Another benefit is that it helps demonstrate your public commitment to environmental protection. This is excellent for your corporate image and CSR. Combined with third-party verification, it really does help show you are committed to environmental protection, and you’re not just pursuing this activity for greenwashing purposes.

It can also be a tendering requirement for a lot of new businesses as it can support a lot of governmental requirements. So, it can be a framework to help you support any mandatory reporting of emissions, such as the SECR (Streamline Energy and Carbon Reporting) and ESOS (Energy Saving Opportunities Scheme) which are requirements essentially based on quantifying emissions and energy usage. So, if you’ve implemented ISO 14064, you’ve (almost) already built that framework to help you with the data collection and data presentation that you’ll need for the SECR and ESOS reporting.

One thing which makes ISO 14064 very different from any of the ISO standards that we have implemented over the last 15 years at Blackmores is the fact that you don’t actually get certification to this standard. It’s classed as a verification, which has options for self-verification and third-party verification.

There are three main tiers to it, let’s find out what they are.

The first tier is the self-verification method, where you essentially pour over the data yourself and decide internally within your company that you’re happy to publish this publicly. Although, this is slightly less credible because your company is essentially verifying itself. The second level to that is a second-party verification, where you get an external body (such as Blackmores) to go over the data and essentially audit you on it. But what is generally regarded as the most credible is a third-party certification, the third tier. This would be done through a UKAS accredited certification body (such as BSI, or NQA). This method demonstrates confidence to all your stakeholders that the verification has been done properly because an independent third party has approved it.

Unlike certificates to management system standards like ISO 14001 (where they’re valid for three years). This is just valid for the period that you’ve actually defined within the scope. So, that could be a period of 12 months, then you would have to go through the re-verification process.

We do have a podcast coming up on Carbonology which focuses on the process to meet the requirements of ISO 14064 and PAS 2060 to be carbon neutral…so, let’s get a sneak peek and find out how Carbonology might help with meeting the requirements of ISO 14064.

Carbonology is based on a seven-step process to help an organisation become carbon neutral. The first step of Carbonology is the Quantify stage. This is where ISO 14064 comes in because this is where you would essentially quantify and document all your greenhouse gas emission sources for scope one, two, and three. So, essentially, ISO 14064 really does form the bedrock of the Carbonology service.

That’s it for today, watch out for our future blogs as we’ll be joining David on the next podcast where we’ll be talking all about the next stage in your journey to becoming carbon neutral.

We’d love to hear your views and comments about the ISO Show, here’s how:

• Share the ISO Show on Twitter or Linkedin
• Leave an honest review on iTunes or Soundcloud. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one.

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Seacourt is the highest scoring B Corp printing company on the planet, they believe in business as a force for good for society.

Fun facts: Seacourt is the winner of the Queens award for sustainable development. They’ve won this three times! In 2017, they were also crowned Europe’s most sustainable SME! No wonder they are recognised as one of the top three leading environmental printers in the world!

Seacourt Managing Director, Gareth Dinnage, joined us for an interview to tell us about Seacourt’s journey and its initiatives. Gareth has been part of Seacourt’s sustainability journey from the very start. He started his journey first as apprentice and then heading up to Sales and Marketing and finally owner and Managing Director.

You’ll learn about:

• Seacourt’s sustainability journey
• Environmental management as a guiding principle for Seacourt and their contributions to the environment
• Seacourt’s journey to understanding their carbon footprint
• Significance of being Net Carbon Zero
• B Corp
• How ISO 9001 and 14001 helps Seacourt run their business
• Understanding your supply chain

Let’s start right back at the beginning of Seacourt’s journey!

Where did Seacourt begin and where did its sustainability journey begin?

Seacourt started in 1946! They were set up as a commercial printing company in Oxford, working with local businesses. Not much changed for them until the mid-90s, when the owners at the time had the good fortune to attend a seminar focused on sustainability.

We know what you must be thinking, whoever put together this seminar must have had incredible foresight, to have looked into commercial impacts and sustainability!

The owners realised that the printing industry is among the fifth largest manufacturing sectors in the UK since 1996…

And that it’s also the fourth worst polluter!

That’s when they decided that they don’t want to be part of the problem, but a part of the solution. This thought marks the moment of a change of goals and priorities for Seacourt. From this point in 1996, the business changed from a linear business model, focusing on outputs, to becoming a value-based business, to considering the impacts on the environment and society, as well as profits.

This marked the magic transformation of Seacourt!

For the last 25 years, their philosophy has been “will this improve the environmental performance of our business. If the answer is “yes!”, then they do it regardless of the financial cost. So, without this fundamental change in mindset, Seacourt would not have been where it is today.

Guiding principle for Seacourt

Environmental management has been a guiding principle for Seacourt for the past 25 years. It’s fundamental and core to the company.

Currently:

• Seacourt runs on 100% renewal energy (and have done so for decades)
• They invented their own printing process called ‘LightTouch’. This has saved them gallons of fresh litres of water
• Seacourt no longer uses water or chemicals in their printing process!
• They have been zero waste to landfill for over a decade.
• They are carbon positive -and that’s scope 1,2 and 3! What this means, for those of you that aren’t familiar with this concept, is that Seacourt sees their impact in every element that they as a business effect. This includes their supply chain, so as a printing industry, they take their impact all the way back to forestry they use for their natural resources. They consider how trees are transported to the papermill, how papermills are run, the energy this it is run on and much more!
• They consider the end-of-life process by producing a natural material that has a massive recycling rate.

So, when you wrap all of this up in its entirety, Seacourt has created a concept called Planet Positive Thinking -which means that they give back more carbon into the atmosphere than they are responsible for consuming.

Seacourt’s journey to understanding their carbon footprint

A lot of businesses are new to the concept of Net Carbon Zero. So, let’s find out how Seacourt went about understanding what their carbon footprint was.

Seacourt does this by unravelling their entire supply chain and ask challenging questions to their supply chain, such as how they power their plants, what is the carbon impact per tonne of paper they are using, how they transport their materials from the forest and much more never before asked questions! They used the amount of paper they have purchased over a 12-month period and worked with their suppliers to get an accurate carbon impact figure. They created their own methodology and matrix, using the same process to identify the carbon impact figure that they used for their paper, for other areas in their operations, for example their ink.

By this point, Seacourt knew their carbon impact holistically for a 12-month period and sought to work on a regenerative project in the Amazonian basin. In this project, Seacourt safeguards 86,000 hectares of endangered forestry and are reforesting 12,000 hectares of deforested lands. They also have a social element where they support a programme with indigenous people. So, this is how Seacourt maintains their Planet Positive Thinking element, as they give back more than they consume in everything they have an impact on.

Significance of being Net carbon zero

Of course, we are conscious of the fact that we are in a lockdown where many businesses are struggling financially. So, this is for those of you thinking “is it going to be really costly for me to be Net Carbon Zero or Carbon positive?”. Gareth emphases the need to understand the impact of sustainability, to have a strategic plan and an idea of what goal you want to reach and how you will achieve it. Otherwise, your business will get left behind! Other business will pick up this leadership agenda and show exactly what business can do. Gareth identifies these businesses as the ones to be the most successful. This is already evident among investors refusing to work with fossil fuel-based business. That’s why business need to act responsibly to stay ahead of the game!

How management systems help Seacourt run their business

Seacourt has been certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 for years. These management tool helps Seacourt set the business up to the highest standards and ensure continual improvement. The quality environmental management system provides a framework for delivering sustainable best practice.

B Corp

Now let’s move on to talk about B Corp!

B Corp is the global movement that aligns businesses who share the same philosophy, which is that businesses can and should be a force for good. Certified B Corps meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. The unifying goal of B Corps is that the main driver is stakeholder value, not shareholder value.  

Understanding your supply chain

For those of you who have not yet looked into their supply chain, Gareth recommends:

1. Observing and controlling your building in terms of energy efficiency (make sure its insulated and you use renewable power)
2. Then send out supplier surveys to find out what your suppliers are doing or working on that you are not aware of
3. Then look at your key supply chain and identify if you can start mapping the carbon impact.

These steps would give you key findings and insights that you can use in your goals and strategy.

Contact details for Gareth, if you have any enquires or would simply like to connect with him, get in contact using one of the ways below:

Website URL : www.seacourt.net

Twitter handle: @seacourtltd

LinkedIn handle: Garethdinnage

We’d love to hear your views and comments about the ISO Show, here’s how:

• Share the ISO Show on Twitter or Linkedin
• Leave an honest review on iTunes or Soundcloud. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one.

Subscribe to keep up-to-date with our latest episodes:

Stitcher | Spotify | YouTube |iTunes | Soundcloud