How Climate Action for Your Small Business Can Have a Big Impact

Five Ways I Reduced Carbon Emissions in My International Business

In 2015, the same year that the Paris Agreement was signed, I flew over 300,000 miles. At the time, I was working with Zespri, the New Zealand kiwi fruit coop.

I also had projects that year in the Netherlands, Sweden and Boston, so it’s no wonder that I accumulated a lot of frequent flyer miles. Sometimes I didn’t even bother to come home; instead, I flew around the world and spent a weekend in Thailand or Singapore. To mitigate the impact of all this timezone hopping, I flew business class and I almost always got a first class upgrade on domestic flights.

I recently used an online calculator to see how much carbon emissions all this air travel had produced, as compared to an average American’s 16 tons of emissions.

I was quite sure I’d generated a lot more than the average American!

It turned out that just one round trip flight from SFO to AKL led to over 11 tons (!!) of carbon emissions! In less than 24 hours in the air, I generated nearly three quarters of what an average American produced in an entire year.

And I was working for a company whose only product is under direct threat from a changing climate!

In November of that year, I met a team from Sunpower, the one working on the new Maxeon solar platform. And that got me thinking seriously for the first time about climate change.

When I do the right things for the climate, I do the right things for my business.

It’s easy to think that, as a small business owner with a handful of employees, my own business is too small to make a difference. But that’s not true.

What we do as individuals, as small business owners, makes a difference — because every bit of carbon matters. Every molecule of CO2 will be around for at least 300 years unless we find a way to remove it. 

And while we engineers and scientists are working on that, the far better option is to keep it from entering the atmosphere in the first place.

It helps to break carbon emissions down into scopes.

Regulators and standards organizations break carbon emissions down into three different scope levels.

• Scope 1: Directly attributed to business operations — the things that you directly control.
  
  For me, air travel is something I directly control. While I don’t own the aircraft or fly the plane, how I structure my work directly impacts whether or not I need to get on that plane in the first place.
  
  Other things within my control: how my team produces workshop materials, how we distribute our content, how my team uses the office spaces we have.
  

• Scope 2: Energy sources — where does your electricity come from? 
  
  We use a local small public utility, and we have little control over that. But we will get a rooftop solar system at some point, and that will help.
  

• Scope 3: Partners, vendors, supply chain — where do emissions come from among your partners and suppliers?
  
  Our key partners are printers and shippers and yes, airlines and hotels.

Across all scope areas, it’s clear that we can reduce or eliminate most of our emissions by focusing on the Big Five key areas that drive our carbon impact.

Big Five areas drive most of my small business’s carbon impact

Here are the five areas with the biggest impact for my small, but international, business:

• Travel and transportation: Yes, we are a lot more conscious now about how we book air travel, and what it takes to get on a plane. We also set ourselves up to work nearly 100% virtually, with team members coming into the office no more than once per week. My new office is closer to my home, so I walk most of the time.

• Shipping of physical goods: Back in the 2010s, we shipped a lot of books and workshop materials around the world. Today, everything is delivered online, including books.

• Use of paper: That also dramatically reduced the amount of paper we’re using. We used to have a high speed color laser in our own office. When it died a couple of years ago, we didn’t need to replace it. I also go virtual myself. I use my iPad for almost everything that I used to print out.

• Use of plastics: We don’t use much plastic, but we have taken some steps that reduced the physical waste we produce. We replaced water bottles with a high grade water filter. We replaced paper and plastic products with reusable dishes, sanitized in a dishwasher.

• Electricity consumption: The biggest change we made in this area was to move to a smaller office in a building with a heat pump.

A lot of these changes have multiple benefits.

If you’re using energy more efficiently, you’re spending less on electricity. If you’re heating your office with a heat pump instead of a gas furnace, you’re also improving indoor air quality. If you’re traveling less, you’re experiencing less fatigue and stress from jet lag.

I love travel, and part of me misses my globetrotting days. But I’m also able to be much more active in my local community because I’m more present to my own home town. That enriches my life tremendously.

I don’t miss the hassle of shipping materials at all: the last-minute rush to get to the FedEx office ahead of their cutoff time, the printer jams always at the worst possible moment, the hours of labor, and the expense.

What about offsets? 

Well, first, one of the best and most humbling things a person can do is to plant a tree. Trees soak up differing levels of CO2 based on their age and species, but in general, you can use about 48 lbs as a good ballpark. 

This means that it takes 20 trees to offset one ton of carbon per year, or about 320 trees to offset the average American’s emissions. So that’s the challenge with offsets. And that’s just the average American consumer.

Offset schemes have been rife with abuse, double-counting, giving companies credit for natural processes that would have happened anyway. So it’s not ideal.

There are some good programs out there that take care to avoid double-counting, and we are offsetting some of our air travel emissions with one of these programs.

Accelerate development to reduce emissions and achieve greater impact

We’re a consulting firm, and so one of the best things we can do is to seek out client projects that are focused on achieving lower carbon emissions and achieve other sustainability goals, and to make sure that what we know is accessible to people working in climate tech. So we started this Substack and we’re working on some climate-specific services.

We do this because if we can help you accelerate development, that lowers the emissions you produce during development and increases the impact your solution can have on the market. Early carbon savings are better than late carbon savings — if we can help your solution climb up the adoption curve faster, everybody wins.

At the same time, you don’t have to be developing the next big climate solution to reduce the impact of your own business right now, by identifying your Big Five contributions to carbon emissions, and seeking to minimize them.