Dr. Torill Bigg of Tunley Engineering joins Dominique Barker to discuss Carbon Reduction Planning, and how businesses of all sizes can assess their carbon footprint, develop and implement a credible roadmap to net-zero.
Dominique Barker: Welcome to The Sustainability Agenda, a podcast series focusing on the evolving complexities of the sustainability landscape with a view on addressing current issues in a concise format to help you navigate and take action. I’m your host, Dominique Barker. Please join me as we explore today’s most pressing matters with special guests that will give you some new perspective and help you make sense of what really matters.
Torill Bigg: I think the first one I see most commonly is in timing. So with your roadmap to net zero carbon, you want a shorter roadmap as possible. It’s important for addressing the climate crisis.
Dominique Barker: Today, we welcome Dr. Torill Bigg, Chief Carbon Reduction Engineer at Tunley Engineering in the UK. Torill is a chartered engineer with over 20 years experience in industry, and she specializes in innovative solutions to environmental protection. She holds a PhD from Cranfield University and she’s a member of the Institute of Chemical Engineers. On today’s episode, we’re going to be discussing carbon reduction planning and how businesses of all sizes can assess their carbon footprint and develop and implement a roadmap to net zero. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, we’ve seen a growing number of public and private sector pledges for net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We’re all aware of that. We’ve talked about it here before. According to data from net zero Tracker, earlier this year, approximately two thirds of the world’s largest publicly traded companies have yet to announce plans to reach net zero. Of the 702 companies with a net zero target, 65% have not made it clear how they plan to achieve that goal. And this is important, we need to be able to have an actual plan if we’re going to be making these targets and promises. So this episode aims to help businesses with their journey to net zero. Good morning Torill. Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of The Sustainability Agenda.
Torill Bigg: Good morning. Thank you for inviting me.
Dominique Barker: So let’s discuss carbon reduction planning. This is, I think, a key thing that you do. Can you please explain the steps that a business can take to assess their carbon footprint and talk about why each step is important?
Torill Bigg: Absolutely. Thank you. So carbon reduction planning it is exactly key to what we do, and the first step that a company must take when working on their carbon reduction plan is to measure their carbon emissions to begin with. So to make a baseline measurement of where they are right now before they can start to make a plan to reduce. So when we work with a company, the first thing that we will do with them is to set an assessment boundary. So we need to decide what the limits of the assessment is going to be. Are they going to be measuring a manufacturing facility or the manufacturing facility and all of the outlying storage, warehousing, transport? Are they going to be measuring for just the country that the main facility is in, or will they have other countries that they have other activities to take into account? So knowing where to start and where to stop and drawing your assessment boundary is your very first step. One of the reasons it’s important is you want to make sure that your measurement is comparable year on year and you want to make sure you don’t go down many rabbit holes trying to collect data that won’t be relevant. So you want to make sure that all of your data is relevant to a carbon assessment. So the first step is your boundary assessment and those are the reasons that’s important. The very second step would be to get together a carbon emission inventory. So that’s a list of all of the emission sources within the boundary. So if you haven’t set your boundary, you wouldn’t know which emissions to keep in and which ones to leave out. So we set an emissions inventory, which is a list of everything that can give rise to greenhouse gases. And at first there is a list of assets and activities to which you will add a set of data. And the data at first will contain the emissions in the form that you immediately have available. So for an asset that uses electricity, you will be collecting kilowatt hours use and it will always be an annual use of that electricity or if it use of gas, but it will also be materials, waste materials disposed. A full list would be a list of the 15 scope three activities, the four scope, two energy activities, and all of your direct energy use in scope one. So you build a greenhouse gas inventory, which is your list of assets, the use of energy and materials associated with it, and then you’ll need to move on to the step of quantification. This is the point at which you’re calculating your greenhouse gas inventory in terms of carbon dioxide equivalents. So for everything that has a greenhouse gas emission, we convert it into the equivalents in carbon dioxide, and that’s what’s going to give you your carbon footprint. So that’s your first stage before we can move to carbon reduction planning.
Dominique Barker: So when you work with companies, you’re trying to figure out the baseline and then you move into the actual carbon reduction planning. So from the assessment, how can a business develop this into a credible roadmap to net zero? What is a typical plan look like? I asked you before the show started, you deal with small companies and large companies, is that correct?
Torill Bigg: Yes. We’ll work with any size of company and we work with international corporations, but we’ll also work with a small coffee shop. So a carbon reduction plan can be prepared for any size of company. Obviously, they’re simpler, the smaller they are or can be simpler. But any size of company can produce a carbon reduction plan. It’s simply a matter of following a methodology keeping to a particular standard. We always keep to an international standard, something like ISO 14,064 and applying the greenhouse gas protocol, for example. So methodology and organization of the data. And after that it’s just a matter of size.
Dominique Barker: So let’s say with the coffee shop, what would be the carbon reduction plan? What would that look like?
Torill Bigg: So we put together our list of assets that give rise to the carbon emissions and we know the size of those emissions from each of those assets which we’ve converted into carbon dioxide equivalents. And from there you form a set of analysis which will show you your carbon hotspots, which are the emission sources, gives rise to the largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions and you want to target the largest emitters for that, you might want some auctioneering. So if you’re running a coffee shop, are your largest amount of carbon emissions coming from your packaging? So maybe disposable cups. Is it from electricity? From running the equipment in the shop and keeping the lights on. Is it in the coffee beans themselves? So you need to know which to target and your options, for example, for electricity, there’ll be more than one option. You may be able to swap to an eco tariff. So you’re buying your electricity from a supplier that makes the electricity from a renewable source. You might have enough roof space for solar panels, so you might be able to change your gas central heating to a heat pump. So there are a number of different ways to reduce your carbon reduction plan, and they’ll each have a different timescale associated and a different amount of cost, a different amount of feasibility. Do you have enough space to put in an air pump? Do you have enough space for a ground source heat pump? So you need to price up in terms of time, in terms of money and in terms of carbon saving, all of the different options that will arrive at the same end, which is to reduce your carbon and you want your best balance of what’s achievable, what’s affordable, what’s timely, and how much carbon it will reduce. So against each of your activities, starting with your biggest hotspot, your carbon reduction plan, what the item will be, how much carbon it will reduce, and therefore how much it will reduce your baseline by. And you’ll have a series of those one after another, each one reducing your carbon footprint by a certain amount until you’ve reduced all possible carbon emissions that you can reduce, leaving you only with a residual carbon emissions. Those that cannot be reduced any further.
Dominique Barker: And is it important to have a internal price of carbon in order to make those decisions? When you talk about an investment in a heat pump or a decision to buy renewable electricity versus installing solar panels on the roof, as you do that economic analysis, do you have an internal price on carbon that you need to have in mind for this?
Torill Bigg: I don’t think it’s an internal price on carbon so much as how many bangs you get for your buck. So how much carbon are you removing for how much investment? That’s why we start with the largest emitter, because you don’t want to spend a large amount of time and energy reducing a small emission source. So if your smallest emission source is electricity, you don’t want to be investing in solar panels. So it’s not so much the internal price of carbon that you’re thinking of just how much you can reduce your carbon by. So more of a carbon benefit analysis.
Dominique Barker: Okay. There must be some implementation pitfalls that you’ve seen. Can you discuss those and maybe how businesses can overcome them?
Torill Bigg: I think the first one that I see most commonly is in timing. So with your roadmap to net zero carbon, you want a shorter roadmap as possible. It’s important for addressing the climate crisis that we have no more carbon emissions, that carbon emissions reached their peak by 2025. That’s quite a short timescale and we then want to halve our carbon emissions by 2030. So you don’t want a roadmap to net zero where the first two years are spent designing the plan, deciding which standard to follow for example. You can do some things quite quickly and you could implement things in the immediate term, which you later put in a better system for. But right now, for example, you could put in an eco tariff, your electricity and it will take 6 to 18 months for you to fit solar panels. But you can in fact get renewable energy from your supplier much sooner, just as soon as you can change contracts. Another item that you need to make sure you consider is the communications with all the stakeholders so that you don’t trip up part of the process by changing one part. It’s great for the carbon, but you’ve maybe messed up a different element of it. So if you’re changing your material in a design of a product you’re making, you need to implement that at the design stage and obviously consult anybody along the way in terms of structural engineers, for example, to make sure that it fits in with all the other plans. And you want to be quite precise about your carbon reduction, you want to be specific about the amount of carbon your actions will reduce. I see a number of plans that say they will reduce scope one and scope two by 30%, and it’s not specific. We need to relate it to the actions we’re undertaking and the specific amount of carbon reduction each of those actions can achieve. And there’s such a thing as carbon debt. So you don’t want, for example, to implement an electric vehicle if the amount of carbon emitted in manufacture of the vehicle is greater than the carbon saved in the operation of the vehicle, and the same might go for something like a forklift truck which needs frequent battery changes. Whereas if you’d not calls the manufacturer of the electric forklift truck but remained with your diesel run forklift truck, your carbon emissions may very well be lower overall. So it’s not to incur a carbon debt in pursuit of an operational carbon saving is another important item, and then taking into account scrappage, if you’re changing a lighting system to an LED lighting system, say by removing the old lighting system, you’ve then caused again an embodied carbon and a material waste carbon emission. So it’s best to plan it in at a stage whereby it would naturally have changed anyway.
Dominique Barker: Its near its end of life.
Torill Bigg: Near its end of life. Yes.
Dominique Barker: Yes. The focus is on the operational emissions. And I think one thing that’s being discussed in climate circles is that emissions will have to go up in the near term to eventually go down. And that’s exactly for some of the reasons you’ve just mentioned, some of that carbon debt, so some of that front end loading of carbon in order to decarbonize over the very long term. I wanted to talk about the spotlight on net zero greenwashing. Do you have advice for companies without a credible net zero target? Without a plan, I suppose?
Torill Bigg: Yeah. So you do see examples where an element of a product or a service is described as environmentally friendly or the whole service is described as environmentally friendly, but only an element of it truly is. Greenwashing is kind of a shortcut way to gain that prowess of having been environmentally responsible without putting in carbon reduction activities. So naturally, I would say the main way to avoid a greenwashing accusation would be to have a measurement of your carbon reduction emissions and a verifiable carbon reduction plan. So measuring it in accordance with one of the standards I’ve mentioned about the greenhouse gas protocol and the international standard, measuring it in those methods so they’re verifiable is one of your best ways forward. There’s been talk recently about adopting the Carbon Disclosure Project model, having a science based target. Any of those would give you a credible carbon reduction plan that you can stand by and you can demonstrate that it’s been measured in a way that is verifiable and that the targets are achievable because you’ve actually completed the measurements and you have stated specific precise measurements of reduction.
Dominique Barker: I’ll maybe add to that. You mentioned the ISO standard 14,064 in terms of greenhouse gas reduction. ISO recently came out with a new standard just a couple of weeks ago about defining carbon neutrality, and so while CDP and SBTI, or Science Based Target Initiative have some definitions. I think the ISO one will be one to follow as well in terms of defining what makes carbon neutrality or net zero. Defining all those terms which have, to date, been really confusing to companies. Torill, I want to thank you and Tunley Engineering for joining us today and thank you to our listeners for tuning in.
Torill Bigg: Thank you very much.
Dominique Barker: Please join us next time as we tackle some of sustainability’s biggest questions, providing different perspectives to help you move forward. I’m your host, Dominique Barker, and this is The Sustainability Agenda.
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