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Over the last two years we have embarked on a challenging environmental journey.
In 2021 we set ourselves the ambitious target of mapping our entire carbon footprint for the previous year. This meant measuring the easier activities such as energy consumption of our stores and headquarters – through to the more difficult activities, such as emissions generated from our global supply chain.
27.03.23
4 min read
Written by Zak Rayment
As a company that builds product, we know that everything we make has an impact on the planet. Whatever we source, however environmentally friendly the materials, the production of any garment will create carbon emissions. The unavoidable fact is, despite our best efforts to source the lowest impact materials and work with the most environmentally conscious manufacturers, we rely on a vast and complexly interwoven supply chain that extends from farms, to factories, all the way to Finisterre – all of which produce emissions.
Enter Green Element, an environmental management consultancy and fellow B Corp. They have over 20 years’ experience helping businesses to become more sustainable, creating tools like Compare Your Footprint to provide organisations with an easier way to calculate the carbon footprint of their operations.
Our early conversations centred around how much of our business we could feasibly obtain emissions for. There were three scopes covering the different areas of our business that produce emissions. But what did these different scopes measure?
Breaking down Carbon Scopes. (Image courtesy of GHG Protocol)
This covers any emissions directly produced by an organisation – this can be from any company vehicles, or from other gas emissions produced by boilers and air-conditioning.
This covers the emissions produced in the production of electricity that we use – that’s basically everything from keeping the lights on to heating, cooling and running the electronic devices we need to work on.
This covers everything else. Yes, everything. Anything from our activities that we do not own or control. That’s the footprint of any materials we buy, the shipping of those materials, the manufacturing process that turns them into garments, the further shipping of the materials to be sold, even through to waste disposal.
With the experience of Green Element behind us we decided to do it all in the first year – mapping out the entire supply chain from raw material to finished product, covering every touch point in between. Green Element said we were brave and asked, ‘are we sure we want to do this now?’ They had recommended that we start by measuring only Scopes 1 and 2 initially.
But surely that wouldn’t make sense? Even before we started hunting down the data, we knew that a huge portion of the emissions we as a company are responsible for would fall into Scope 3.
What we measured...
The results.
Did it take longer? Yes. Did we find some things we’d rather not have? Obviously.
The uncomfortable truth is that we produce a considerable amount of carbon making our clothes. We discovered that 93% of our emissions are produced in the supply chain – materials, transport, manufacturing & distribution – which is covered by Scope 3. Further to this, we found that 68% of those CO2 emissions come from the textiles themselves; from growing, to processing and creating the fabrics.
After mapping our 2020 footprint we reluctantly concluded that with such a small team, gathering enough quality data to accurately map our scope 3 emissions in the first year was overly ambitious. Our team is passionate about protecting the environment, but we had to take a step back to consider what we could realistically implement to reduce our impact as a smaller business.
We kept motivated by focusing on energy consumption, managing to successfully reduce our scope 1 & 2 emissions by 48%! We did this by switching the power in more of our stores and offices to 100% renewable electricity.
We are now in a better position to review scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions for our 2022 operations - using Green Element for strategic support and their Compare Your Footprint tool to streamline the carbon footprint process. This will arm us with meaningful data that highlights our carbon hotspots, enabling us to build a realistic carbon reduction strategy to meet our science-based targets.
The important outcome is that we are making progress. It may not be perfect, and may never be perfect, but we are committed to always learning and improving.
We have used our 2020 baseline carbon footprint to set near-term science-based targets that are aligned to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5ºC cap on global heating. These targets have been officially validated by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) through their streamlined route for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We are committed to reducing scope 1 and scope 2 emissions 42% by 2030 from our 2020 base year, and to measure and reduce our scope 3 emissions. Our aim is to also validate our long-term net-zero target too.
