Tag Archives: carbon

News

JustCarbon helps SMEs support race to net zero

Climate-conscious companies are increasingly feeling the pressure to step up the pace in the Race to Net Zero.

 

But for some that will be a tough exercise. No matter how great their intentions and practical efforts to cut emissions, they will continue to produce carbon that impacts the climate.

 

That goal of net zero – putting no more carbon into the atmosphere than you’re taking out of it – can seem unattainable to a small business. But, instead of striving for the impossible, the solution is to offset the carbon that absolutely can’t be reduced, says JustCarbon, a blockchain carbon credit marketplace.

 

“With COP27 just around the corner and a keenness for politicians to take more action to tackle the climate emergency,businesses will, in time, have to make the leap into making a real commitment as part of the evolutionary low carbon economy,” stresses Adrian Rimmer, JustCarbon co-founder. “Because what you do, no matter how small your business, can make a real difference to the planet.

 

“However, we understand that it is still a voluntary decision and it may be very difficult to address unavoidable carbon emissions that occur even with emissions-reducing techniques. This is where alternatives come into play, for example engaging another organisation to purchase carbon credits that help fund capture carbon elsewhere through things like tree-planting projects to support carbon sequestration.”

 

Not only do opportunities like this reduce net emissions, they can also produce benefits in other ways, like improving biodiversity and people’s livelihoods. Nature-based carbon offsets that are certified and verified ensure positive effects on climate change mitigation.

 

Adrian Rimmer continues: “Businesses should understand that not all carbon offsets are the same. Some are poor quality and have limited or negative impacts. Equally, continuing a ‘business as usual’ approach, while purchasing offsets without a combined emissions reduction strategy is equally as detrimental and could be seen as greenwashing.”

 

JustCarbon, which supports the UK government’s partnership with business and climate group, the UK Business Climate Hub, offers businesses a simple, straightforward way to take meaningful action to offset their climate impact through the purchase of high quality, nature-based carbon credits. Converting carbon credits to JustCarbon Removal Units (JCRs) and making these available for sale, provides climate project developers with a simple and accessible way of monetising their carbon removal activities.

 

“Small businesses account for 99% of UK enterprises so the potential for meaningful change is enormous. Our aim is to encourage more and more to take practical action on climate change as, collectively, the individual actions of many companies can be transformational.” Ended Adrian Rimmer.

 

The UN’s ambition to combat global warming requires emissions to reduce by 45% by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050. The UK Business Climate Hub has advice, tools and resources to help companies cut their carbon emissions, including how to offset those that cannot be reduced.

News, Sustainability

Orbus Software partners with Planetly to drive sustainability and accelerate carbon emission reductions across the global tech ecosystem

  • The integration with Planetly will enable Orbus to visualise, calculate, reduce and offset its carbon footprint as part of its mission to help organisations achieve carbon negative commitment in 2022
  • Orbus Software will also empower customers with insights into how to accelerate their digital transformation journeys to become more digital, resilient and sustainable enterprises

London: 12th April: Orbus Software, a leading provider of cloud solutions for digital transformation, has today announced its global partnership with Planetly, the technology company on a mission to support business transformation to a net-zero economy.

Planetly’s software helps organisations globally to introduce and automate carbon management, from data collection to carbon reduction strategies and offsetting measures. The company is a trusted partner for Orbus Software, which will use the system across three of its core regions. The main focus will be to support Orbus Software’s internal sustainability and reporting, including calculating the company’s carbon footprint and biggest emission drivers in real time, setting targets, while reducing and offsetting carbon emissions.

The Planetly integration will also give Orbus Software customers insight into how their digital transformation journeys are impacting the company’s sustainability outcomes. Customers can therefore adapt their digital transformation roadmaps to improve sustainability, and can map these insights with the enterprise architecture data that Orbus Software provides.

Michael D’Onofrio, CEO at Orbus Software, commented: “Sustainability decisions are central to executive and board level conversations today and our technology architecture and digital infrastructure are key areas we need to address as part of broader sustainability programs. Planetly is dedicated to helping organisations go above and beyond, and giving organisations the power to visualise their sustainability activity to make core business decisions is key to this. One company on a sustainability mission is great, but thousands are even better.”

Alongside supporting Orbus Software and its customers with sustainability initiatives, the partnership will also see Planetly consolidate Orbus Software’s data integration to enhance its reporting model in the near future. Together, the two companies will help organisations to make strategic business decisions while simultaneously communicating the benefits and opportunities that come with being more sustainable.

The news follows OneTrust’s acquisition of Planetly in December 2021. Orbus Software and OneTrust have a longstanding bi-directional integration and partnership, which enables risk architects and managers in OneTrust to capture, identify and manage risks against technology and digital assets.

D’Onofrio continued: “Planetly is an emerging technology platform and has a wide range of capabilities that us and our customers can leverage to achieve ambitious sustainability and carbon negative goals. Our existing relationship with the OneTrust team was also a factor for choosing Planetly. It was the perfect time to engage with them, and we’re excited about where our partnership and platform integrations can lead for both Orbus Software and our customers.”

Anna Alex, Founder and CCO at Planetly, added: “Knowing your company’s carbon emissions has become a must-have in today’s business world and it will become even more important with the newest climate disclosure rule. Every company that has already decided to manage their carbon emission on a voluntary basis will have an advantage going forward and we are excited that Orbus Software chose us as their partner for their climate journey.”

Climate, News

Platform.sh commits to helping its customers reduce carbon emissions from cloud activities

Paris/San Francisco, 17th March 2022 – Platform.sh, a unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform for building, running and scaling web applications, has worked with Greenly to calculate its carbon emissions to provide a clear picture to its customers. 

Climate change is real. The IT sector is estimated to be responsible for 4% of the global GES emissions, a bigger impact than the airline industry already, and it is growing much faster. Platform.sh is committed to reducing its impact on the environment, alongside its customers, as a signatory to the Climate Act. 

Platform.sh limits environmental impact by reducing its hardware and energy usage, then optimising its respective emissions and offsetting what is leftover. 

Platform.sh reduces energy use by: 

  • Application Performance Monitoring—optimising individual apps performance means using fewer resources to run the same workloads.
  • Increasing server density—servers are often under-utilised and under-optimised, with anything between 60-80% of their capacity going to waste. Platform.sh uses proprietary technology to increase density up to 12 times and cut energy usage up to 10x.
  • Rightsizes and scales—No more overprovisioning. Platform.sh works with businesses to understand their needs today and allow them to grow fast and responsibly.

Platform.sh optimises infrastructure to reduce emissions by: 

  • Supports multiple cloud providers—optimising infrastructure providers offer different advantages, including better Power Usage Effectiveness. Customers can choose the cloud providers that offer the most benefits, where it matters.
  • Using the right location—data center location can make a huge difference to CO2e emissions. For example, a datacenter in Sweden, using renewable energy, emits ten times less CO2e per kWh than one powered by coal-generated electricity in Germany.

The rise of cloud services and cloud hosting makes it easy to forget about certain carbon costs—but any business aiming to reduce emissions must understand its complete carbon footprint. 

To enable this, Platform.sh is improving its environmental impact model and opening it to its customers, allowing them to take impactful action. 

“We have a responsibility to not just be a sustainable business, but to ensure everything we do enables our customers to be sustainable too—they need to be able to understand their impact to either reduce it or offset it,” said Fred Plais, CEO, Platform.sh. “In the past it was common to improve performance by “throwing more metal” at it—that is, to use more and better hardware. This approach is fundamentally flawed, solving nothing in the long run, and contributing to environmental damage.” 

Business Advice, Energy, News

5 top tips for business owners who want to save money and improve their green credentials

Business renewable energy specialists Opus Energy share their top tips for business owners keen to reduce their carbon footprint and save money

For business owners, managing your energy consumption is no longer just about keeping tabs on your outgoings – it’s a prerequisite for doing business. Consumer-facing companies that aren’t seen to be environmentally responsible face losing customers, while those further up the supply chain are now being asked by prospective clients to prove their green credentials.

Putting sustainability into practice should now be at the top of the agenda across every industry. Companies are becoming increasingly bold in how they communicate this to customers and stakeholders; at the end of January, The Guardian reinforced its commitment to reducing its carbon footprint by announcing a ban on advertising from fossil fuel firms.

For most business owners, however, it needn’t be that complicated. One of the simplest ways to reduce your impact on the planet and improve your bottom line is by switching to renewable energy and being smart with the energy you use. But how do we navigate the sea of information out there and find a solution that truly works for you and your company?

In this article, the experts at Opus Energy, one of the leading providers of renewable energy to businesses, gives 5 top tips on how to become more sustainable and save some money in the process. All of these can be scaled in a way that works for you – no matter what size your business is.

Start small

Implementing more sustainable practices into your business needn’t break the bank. In fact, there are plenty of small steps you can take that, when measured over time, end up going a long way. For example, did you know that turning the office heating down by 1°C you can reduce your annual heating bill by up to 8%? So, if your business spends £500 a month on energy, that small turn of the dial would save you £480 each year – the equivalent of one month’s energy.

Similar savings can be made across other aspects of your business. Take electricity costs for lighting as another example: leaving the lights on in the meeting room never seems like a big deal – but, by using motion sensitive lighting you could save enough energy to make up to 300 cups of tea.

Likewise, using energy-efficient lighting can save businesses about £1,500 a year.

Another tip is to have a company-wide switch off policy. While it may seem trivial, leaving 50 computers on overnight for a year would create enough CO2 to fill a double decker bus – and cost your business £1.76 a day.

Company cars: Choose the right vehicle

While a lot has been said about leveraging the benefits of car-pooling and subscription-based mobility services, the use of cars for some companies is an unavoidable part of doing business. If your business offers company cars to your employees, it pays to ask yourself the right questions when deciding on what vehicles to go for. How long will your drivers be on the road for and what distances will they be covering? Will they be driving in city centres where Clean Air Zones are in place? And if they were to drive an electric vehicle (EV), would they have access to charging points along the way?

Taking all of this into consideration is key in saving money and reducing emissions, as it can make a huge difference in determining the correct type of vehicle necessary.

It’s also crucial that you look at the whole life costs when choosing a vehicle. It’s easy to focus on the headline sticker price – this is often the case when looking at EVs which in the past have carried a heftier price tag – but there are many other costs involved, from taxes and insurance to fuel and vehicle depreciation. So, when you add all of these up, you might find that switching to an EV fleet isn’t as expensive as you thought.

What’s more, EVs are becoming increasingly affordable, so there’s never been a better time to think of making the switch. They offer two solutions at once: reducing exhaust-related emissions and reducing the use of fossil-derived fuels. By switching your business-use vehicles, including fleet vehicles, to EVs, you can make a drastic cut your carbon footprint.

Use a smart meter

The UK Government estimates that installing energy efficiency measures could reduce the energy costs for SMEs by between 18% and 25%. One such example of this is the smart meter, which gives SME owners access to vast quantities of real-time data-related insights into how and where they use their energy. This transparency allows businesses to be smarter and more energy efficient, providing them with an easy way to be more sustainable.

Smart meters are also the backbone of the Smart Grid, which will play a significant role in the UK Government’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050 by ensuring that supply and demand are always in balance. For companies looking to be proactive in their efforts to cut their carbon footprint and play their part, the smart meter is a savvy move.

Invest in renewables

If you’ve already switched your energy supply to a more environmentally friendly tariff or provider, why not look into generating your own renewable power? If you are able to, installing solar panels are a cost-effective way of ensuring the energy your office or building uses is completely renewable.

Making this switch to renewable energy can reduce not only your environmental impact but contribute towards the wider decarbonisation across the UK’s electricity network. It’s also a way for your business to diversify, by bringing in a new stream of revenue. If done right, it can be low effort, high impact and great for the environment.

Think long term

When it comes to saving money through sustainable practices, it’s crucial that we train ourselves to think long-term, rather than simply thinking about immediate gains. The change associated with moving towards sustainability can often be a deterrent for business owners, as there is a perception that these come at a large cost. But making small changes really can pay off in a big way, both for the environment and your bottom line.
Every business is different, but by taking inspiration from the tips above and combining this with your own research, you should be able to find ways that work for you and your budget.