As experts in improving building efficiency, optimising energy and carbon emissions is a large part of LCMB’s offering. As such, we ensure that we too are an efficient operation and have made push to achieve net zero carbon from Jan 2021.
How did we do it?
As much as we can, we innovate to reduce our emissions and try to travel using public transport as often as possible – of course, in the current COVID environment, this is less easy to achieve.
We analysed the Scope 1 and 2 emissions of our organisation as well as the Scope 3 emissions caused by our business travel. Our assumption is that the rest of our scope 3 emissions will be mitigated as those services we use such as Google and Microsoft take a path to net zero for their scope 1 and 2 emissions. Once we had analysed our overall consumption affiliated with our offices, such as gas, electricity and refrigerant usage, we then used the Goverment’s latest carbon conversion factors to calculate our total carbon emissions from the past financial year.
Scope 1 – all of your direct consumption from your company facilities and vehicles.Â
Scope 2 – indirect emissions, such as purchased electricity (ie, the emissions created when generating the electricityÂ
Scope 3 – all all other indirect emissions not controlled by the business such as commuting, shipping, business travel, waste generated, etc. Often scope 3 emissions are best reduced by using suppliers who are also committed to being net zero.Â
The nature of LCMB’s business means we travel – a lot. We travel to see our clients, their sites and our various projects around the country. The difficulty this then presents is the impact our emissions have on the environment. We measured our vehicular and public transport mileage and converted these using the latest conversion rates.
Although we have done what we can to reduce our carbon emissions, we do still have some climate impact. To counteract our emissions, we have now joined the Carbon Club, run by Forest Carbon, an organisation offering a means of offsetting for smaller organisations through allowing them to contribute to the creation new woodlands in the UK, which ultimately will sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere for years to come. Their woodland schemes are independently certified and monitored. With the help of Forest Carbon, LCMB have now balanced their carbon emissions through removing as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we put in. In fact, we are removing more so hope to achieve a net negative carbon position in 2021.
If you are looking to reduce your organisation’s climate impact, LCMB can help by measuring your consumption and emissions as well as analyse the data to help identify ways to reduce your carbon footprint and improve your operational performance. If this is something you would like support with, please get in touch.
