- Sustainability
Tracking Our Carbon Footprint
🔬 Lauren T
Do you remember our 2023 Impact Report? Well, if you do, we set five major sustainability goals that we’re determined to complete and hold ourselves accountable for in 2024.
If you need a quick reminder, our top five goals for the year are:
Track Emissions: Establish a baseline for Scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions.
Conduct LCAs: Evaluate the environmental impact of all products from raw material to disposal.
Set Reduction Initiatives: Develop targeted plans to reduce emissions based on tracking and LCAs.
Enhance Ingredient Traceability: Improve tracking of ingredient sourcing to ensure sustainability.
Increase Recycled Packaging: Use recycled materials for at least 60% of our packaging to minimise waste.
The importance of our sustainability goals
Goals number one and two are especially important to us because we understand the weight of the current climate situation. As the world races towards Net Zero climate targets set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement, there is a particular - and understandable - focus on businesses to be the drivers of this change.
To be a driver of change means we need to understand what needs to change. To do that, we used a platform called Greenly to measure our emissions and perform LCAs for all of our products.
Before we jump into the results, here are some quick definitions to help you out!
What does this all mean?
What are emissions?
Emissions are pollutants released into the atmosphere from human activities like transportation, industry, and energy production, with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) contributing to climate change.
What are Scope Emissions?
In terms of Scope Emissions, these are categories used to classify a company’s greenhouse gas emissions. There are three major categories:
Scope 1: Direct Emissions from owned sources Scope 2: Indirect emissions from purchased energy Scope 3: Indirect emissions from across the company’s value chain
What is a Company Carbon Footprint?
The total amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that a company emits directly and indirectly as a result of its activities. This is where the scope emissions go!
Now, what are our results?
To establish a baseline, you need to collect at least one full calendar year's worth of data meaning these are our results from 2023. Through compiling financial data and other tracked metrics, we determined that we emitted 14.6k tonnes of CO2e in 2023, equivalent to the annual emissions of 1.2k British people or 8.6k flights from London to New York.
Lifecycle Assessments
In addition to looking at our total emissions, we performed LCAs for every product we make.
Here are the total emissions per product:
Deodorant Case 1.0 - 3.637 kg of CO2e Deodorant Case 2.0 - 3.257 kg of CO2e Deodorant Refill - 0.019 kg of CO2e Body Wash Case - 4.426 kg of CO2e Body Wash Refill - 0.510 kg of CO2e Lip Balm Case - 0.750 kg of CO2e Lip Balm Refill - 0.020 kg of CO2e
Why we need this information
Having these numbers is a game-changer for our sustainability journey, especially looking at the exciting evolution from deodorant case 1.0 to 2.0! At first glance, it might seem like just a small tweak but through iterating our case, we’ve dropped its emissions from 3.637 to 3.257 CO2, a 9.21% reduction in CO2e per case, by using fewer materials and less energy in production.
With data like this at our disposal, we’ve identified emission hotspots across our operations, supply chain, and products and now have the tools to jump into action and establish our reduction goals through science-based strategies and initiatives to foster meaningful change and pave the way toward our net zero objectives.
