November 23, 2021

Becoming Carbon Neutral Verified - What's the Benefit?

By Team Halvo
Becoming Carbon Neutral Verified - What's the Benefit?

 When starting out, one of the foundations of the business was to be carbon neutral in everything we do. We really had no idea how to approach this so went to a few big name companies who said they'll calculate for us, and then we pay to offset our carbon. Sounds good right?

It turns out when you actually start to ask questions about how they calculate, they start to become quite vague. After all that is their business model, and the market for 'becoming carbon neutral' is huge and ever more growing as more businesses look to become environmentally friendly. One company quoted us £6,575 a year and in return we'd offset our carbon, but only get a figure of our carbon emissions per year.

We wouldn't get a real understanding where these emissions were coming from, and for us that wasn't good enough. If we don't know where our biggest emissions are coming from, we can't actively participate in finding ways to reduce them in the first place. On the other side we could estimate and calculate future projects more effectively within our business and their impact on the environment. We'll always add an extra 10% to our carbon emissions just to make sure. We believe reducing emissions first, and then offsetting them.

By being able to calculate our on emissions and choosing how to offset these, we are in full control rather than these companies. We are able to pick and choose to be able to support third-party verified programmes and projects. So far we contribute to 1% For The Planet and Ecologi. You can read more about this on Our Sustainability Commitment.

Once we have this data over our first few months, we'll make it publicly available and where we haven't accounted enough carbon offset currently, we'll double the offset.

So while we're not verified, you'll be able to dig into the details have a look at all aspects of our business.

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