Martineau
Occupying its building as a tenant created challenges for Martineau in seeking to footprint its energy usage and identify reduction measures. It believes there are advantages to working together with other tenants and the landlord.
We recognise that responsibility for the environment is an integral part of good business practice, and our activities and initiatives in this area form a key part of our broader corporate social responsibility agenda. Our strategy is set out in our Environmental Policy(add hyperlink to MJ envpol on website), overseen by an Environmental Committee, and involves a series of sustained initiatives to meet our environmental objectives.
We also recognise that, increasingly, our existing and prospective clients, driven by their own corporate social responsibility agendas, are asking us to demonstrate our commitment in this area.
An important part of our efforts to minimise the impact of our business activities on the environment concerns carbon emissions. To help us identify and prioritise our activities in this area, and to enable us to measure progress, we decided to carry out work to calculate our carbon footprint.
In calculating our carbon footprint, we adopted a 4 stage approach, following so far as possible guidance in the GHG Protocol:
1. Operational Boundary
We established our operational boundary as our Birmingham and London offices (affiliated law firms in our international networks were ignored for this purpose).
2. Scoping
We decided to limit our carbon footprint to carbon dioxide emissions. Next, we thought about the carbon emissions associated with our various business activities and the extent to which we would include them in our footprint. We settled on:
• Scope 1 - our direct carbon emissions
• Scope 2 - carbon emissions associated with our energy usage
• Scope 3 - carbon emission associated with our business travel, our waste IT equipment, waste paper, archiving and courier services
We excluded staff commuting until we are able to gain a better understanding of our staff commuting habits.
3. Data Collection
We looked at how we could extract and collect the relevant raw data from our business as follows:
Scope 1: emissions associated with our gas fired boilers in our two premises.
• Reviewed our gas bills from our landlord, and took an average annual cost over the last 2 complete years. We used this cost derive a kWh consumption.
Scope 2: emissions associated with electricity we purchase from our landlords.
• We treated our tenanted floor areas and common areas separately. For our tenanted areas, we are separately metered and hence were able to derive our kWh consumption based on single year meter readings. For common areas, we looked at electricity bills from our landlords apportioned by floor area, and took an average cost over the last 2 complete years, and used this to derive a kWh consumption.
Scope 3: emissions associated with business travel, waste IT equipment, wastepaper, archiving and document couriers.
We chose to exclude staff commuting, private use of cars, water usage, catering, stationery, post/DX and off-site staff/partner events.
• Business travel: we derived yearly data from staff expense claims/itineraries from our travel agent and credit card receipts, via our accounts system, broken down into air, rail and car.
• Waste IT equipment: we estimated the quantity of waste equipment collected by our contractor during a year.
• Wastepaper: we estimated the quantity of wastepaper collected by our contractor during a year (ignoring quantities sent for recycling).
• Archiving: we estimated the number of collections made by our contractor in a year
• Document couriers: we looked at the invoices received from our courier during the year with a view to ascertaining an indicative value for road miles assuming a pence/mile rate.
4. Conversion Factors
Finally, we took the collected data, and applied a variety of conversion factors as recommended by Defra.
Constraints and Challenges
With regard to scope 1 and 2 emissions, we occupy our building as tenant, which creates challenges when seeking to carbon footprint our energy usage and identifying reduction measures:
• we have limited influence in relation to consumption in common areas, and also in relation to green procurement
• where our tenanted floors are not separately metered (gas) and bills are apportioned amongst all tenants by floor area, our consumption can only be an estimate, and financial savings from reducing consumption across our floors are therefore shared with co-tenants
Data collection also represented a key challenge in relation to scope 3 emissions.
For tenanted buildings, there is clearly a commonality of interest amongst tenants and advantages in working together in designing and implementing energy efficiency measures for the building and achieving effective engagement with the landlord.
Alongside energy consumption of buildings, we were surprised that business air travel represented such a significant proportion of our footprint.
The outcome of this process has given us an indicative carbon footprint, based on a variety of assumptions. We have chosen to present this on a “per employee” basis.
Using the footprint and the data collected from this activity we now have a basis to:
• identify, and prioritise, the key areas for achieving emission reductions
• identify and implement appropriate reduction initiatives
• achieve a high level of employee engagement to the process
• better understand staff commuting habits with a view to extending our footprint in this and other scope 3 areas not currently included
• work with other LSA members to align methodologies and agree a process for disclosure
• identify options for offsetting