TTP Group Operations Emissions
At TTP, we foster a culture of transparency. Colleagues from across the business are encouraged to work together to apply new ideas across industries. Clients and project teams are encouraged to break down communication barriers to enable a free flow of information – all to spur better results.
But like nearly every other business, we (understandably) hesitate to broadcast where we’re struggling. On climate, this omission of communication matters. When looking at our own impact, we find that the lion’s share of our emissions are those attributable to us through the goods and services we purchase from others. These estimates rely on businesses being honest about their emissions, even if they are not currently flattering. Unless we are all more frank and transparent about estimating our carbon emissions, we are bound to produce inaccurate estimates, slowing down the urgent transition we must make.
We in TTP’s Sustainability Committee therefore want to open the lid on our carbon accounting process and encourage others to do the same.
Crunching Numbers: Estimates of Scope 1 and 2 Emissions
Carbon accounting is the process of estimating a business’s contribution to climate change, measured through the mass of CO2 emitted in its operations.To simplify things and enable easier comparisons, we will ignore the emissions from exceptional items (the construction of our new campus) for this discussion and instead focus on those resulting from our standard business activities.
In all of this, we follow the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and publish our carbon emissions on the Carbon Disclosure Project as part of our Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) commitments.
We start with the more straightforward and less interesting emissions – known as Scope 1 and 2 emissions – before we get to those that are more difficult to get a handle on but will benefit the most from greater transparency.
Scope 1 emissions are the emissions directly released by the company doing the accounting. For our business, this mostly consists of emissions associated with heating and cooling; mainly the gas central heating in our previous building (72 tCO2e, 1% of TTP Group emissions [excluding TTP Campus build]) and refrigerant loss from the old air conditioning systems. Last year we lost 8kg of refrigerant, but the gases are so potent that they have the same global warming effect as 18 tCO2. In our new, state-of-the-art TTP Campus with offices and lab space the system has not had any detectable losses and our heating and cooling is from air source heat pumps.
Scope 2 emissions are similarly easy: how much carbon is emitted to make the electricity we consume? Our new building is more efficient than our previous offices, with about 10% of our electricity requirements being met by rooftop solar (the rough figure after one year’s occupancy).
While Scope 1 and 2 emissions are relatively easy to estimate, there are still decisions to be made. One of those was raised in the previous paragraph: whether to report Scope 2 emissions based on the UK’s electricity mix (known as “location based” reporting and, in our case, based off figures published by the UK government, giving us emissions of 525 tCO2e, or 6% of our total) or to reflect the carbon intensity of the tariff we’ve chosen with our electricity supplier (“market based”, giving us emissions of 342 tCO2e, or 4% of our emissions). We were briefly caught out by the energy crisis and forced onto a “brown” tariff, but a year on we are back onto a 100% renewable tariff. Using the “market-based” method, the future of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions looks fairly bright.
Difficult to estimate: Scope 3 Emissions
Like most office-based businesses, our biggest source of emissions are the Scope 3 emissions associated with the goods and services we buy. Again, we begin with the smaller numbers that are fairly easy to estimate, before moving on to the larger numbers which are difficult to estimate and would benefit from transparency by everyone.
Waste disposal
Waste disposal is a service any business needs to buy, and the associated carbon emissions are relatively easy both to estimate and to improve upon.
As a medium-sized product and technology development company, we produce a significant amount of waste. Yet using the previously mentioned UK Government conversion tables, we estimate that this is associated with about 1.8t of CO2e, or about the same as that associated with the waste produced by 8 average UK households. This is thanks to the fantastic Facilities Team at TTP and our waste service provided by Ellgia where our rubbish is sorted, and all but a tiny fraction is reused in one way or another.
Travel to and from the office
Commuting is another source of emissions we have a fairly good grasp of (449 tCO2e, 5%) and where carbon accounting can go hand in hand with improvement. We believe that face-to-face interaction between our employees across industries turbo-charges innovation. That means that most of us commute to our new offices every day. We provide modest payroll-related incentives to encourage cycling, commuting by train, and electric vehicle leasing, all of which are popular among our staff. But we suspect that other businesses have come up with more imaginative schemes to reduce the footprint of travelling to and from the office – please get in touch to tell us how we might improve.
Business travel
Business travel emissions are similarly easy to estimate (1374 tCO2e, 15%) – what is less clear is how we can improve going forward.
We serve clients around the world, from the US to Japan to New Zealand. Whilst trains can be viable for visiting clients in most of the UK, Benelux, and Northern France, for those further a field flying is unavoidable if we are to exchange know-how with partners (see our piece on how we do that: Design Transfer Without Dropping the Ball). We try to pack our trips with meetings, but both from an environmental and business perspective, we don’t think that “meetings per trip” is the right metric to reduce our carbon footprint. We want many high-quality meetings per trip. That’s a much more difficult metric to quantify.
A meeting that kicks off a project is obviously of high value, but how do we measure the preceding meetings? What about the meetings that maintain relationships and exchange best practice and thinking? Or those where we’ve recommended that a company needs something we cannot offer and pointed them in a better direction? All have value, and value to different parties. We don’t know if there could be a way to travel less for the same business benefit, or perhaps even for more – do you have ideas?
In the meantime, we’ve gone beyond the SBTi and now offset our flights with Tradewater. We did substantial due diligence to find an offset that we believe is credible. Many schemes overestimate their impact or did not meet our requirement that the offset should be additional, but we believe that we really can make a difference with Tradewater.
Our supply chain
Then there are the myriad goods and services we buy to deliver services to our clients. They account for 6688 tCO2e or 71% of the total, yet the uncertainties associated with them are massive.
One way to estimate these emissions is to use a list of conversion factors published by the UK Government – titled Table 13. In using this table, we took the lead from global behemoth BASF.
Last updated in 2014, this table assigns a carbon intensity per pound sterling spent across a wide range of goods and services. We classified each of our suppliers into the most relevant category, then calculated emissions by multiplying our spending by the appropriate Table 13 factor.
The issues with this approach are manifold.
Assigning industries to all of our suppliers is time consuming. As a consultancy business, working across industries from clean energy to biosensing to diagnostics, we use a lot of suppliers. Any one of them may be operating in several of the industries included in Table 13, adding to the potential for error.
Even if we were able to accurately categorise companies, changing the averages to only account for inflation misses the substantial changes in how industries operate that have occurred over the past decade. Yet we are not aware of better industry average figures.
And yet even that is far from perfect! As we were first made aware of by R.S.Kaplan and K. Ramanna in the Harvard Business Review and also pointed out to us by BSI, industry averages are a very poor way to incentivise companies to improve. Why improve when your emissions performance can be improved purely by the efforts of your competitors?
In response to these issues, we are starting to adjust our methodology. Instead of using outdated conversion factors, we want to look at the Scope 1, 2,and 3 emissions of our suppliers. Specifically, we want to work out what share of their emissions is attributable to our purchases based on the share of their revenue we are responsible for. We know other companies are adopting this method.
Here, we are running into another snag. Many companies do not publish estimates of their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. This is sometimes due to entirely reasonable constraints: they may be too small and find compiling them too costly in both time and money. Even as a company with about 400 employees, we find our resources stretched.
For others, it may be that they have the numbers but are reluctant to publish them for fear that they won’t look good. To them we say, publish and improve! We understand that this journey to sustainability is a work in progress. But, as we hope you’ll appreciate by now, with transparency it’ll become easier for everyone.
For those that do publish their numbers, many do not do so in a place where they may be easily found, or in a standardised manner. Believe us, those who have published accessible numbers have gained great appreciation among the Sustainability Team here at TTP. It makes the job so much easier for us – all of us – to arrive at more realistic estimates of our carbon intensity.
The method matters. The change from estimated carbon intensity per pound to specific emissions attributable to us has changed the figures massively for some of our suppliers. Some carbon figures have shot up by over 300%, others have dropped by more than 95%. Overall, for the suppliers with numbers we’ve seen an average fall of 24% in attributed emissions. We are continuing to engage with our bigger suppliers, to encourage them to publish their Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Doing Better
We’ve published this to explain our thinking so that we can be constructively criticised. We have our known unknowns, for which we’ve posed the questions:
- How can we further lower our commuting footprint?
- Can we improve the effectiveness of our business travel, i.e., travel less but achieve more?
- What better ways are there to capture supply chain emissions than the “dusty” Table 13?
- Are there other ways to encourage suppliers toshare their numbers with us?
We have tried to be transparent to share learnings and invite suggestions. So, if, in reading this, you have a good answer to one of our questions or have spotted something that is an unknown unknown to us: get in touch! Tell us where we’ve been unclear or made an error or otherwise may have missed a way to improve.
We’re doing this because we want to encourage transparency in general. Openness on this front makes it easier for everyone to estimate their emissions so we can accelerate not only innovation but also progress towards net zero.
Footnote
Underneath, TTP publishes its annual carbon emissions on the Carbon Disclosure Project as part of our Science Based Targets Initiative.
The numbers below are those we calculated for the financial year FY22/23. Categories in which we’ve reported no emissions reflect the fact that we do not conduct any business in those areas. The S3C2 category includes the emissions from the construction of our new campus, which was an exceptional purchase.
Further explanation of the categories can be found in the Technical Guidance for Calculating Scope 3 Emissions of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
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