Carbon Footprinting

In 2010 many more businesses will need to know more about the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by their activities in order to comply with the Carbon Reduction Commitment. Any site using more than 6,000Mwh with half hourly or automatic metering in 2008 will be required to purchase carbon allowances creating a real incentive to reduce carbon emissions in as many ways as possible.

Carbon emissions can be divided into 3 distinct groups; emissions produced directly by the business eg, those produced by vehicles owned by the company or fuel combustion carried out on site (Scope 1), emissions produced indirectly eg, those produced by energy suppliers to the business (Scope 2) and indirect emissions produced as a result of the business's supply chain (Scope 3). It is the last of these that is so difficult to do and yet provides the greatest potential to reducing carbon footprints for businesses.

This is where String can help; consider the scenario, large retailer BrandCo sells a range of hair accessories. BrandCo shifts a lot of stock and has more than one manufacturer producing identical hair accessories but by tracing the products at batch level it becomes possible to see that ManuA uses metal sourced and refined on one site whereas ManuB uses metal sourced on one site but refined many miles away. Instantly BrandCo can reduce its carbon footprint by increasing production with ManuA and reducing its reliance on ManuB.

Imagine this effect multiplied across a range of products and the savings become larger. String allows visibilty through the whole supply chain so that responsible manufacturers can make their differences known and careful brands can pick their suppliers with precision.

At present a business has three ways in which it can calculate its Scope 3 emissions:

• conduct a lifecycle analysis using averages available from many sources - secondary data is imprecise and allows no scope for differentiation
• hire a consultancy to produce a tailored report based on their own data - the data is the businesses own but this is an expensive way to produce a report which is out of date as soon as the supply chain changes
• use String to collect real data in the supply chain - the data is exact, responsive, always up to date and comparatively inexpensive to collect