A few years ago, we embarked on a journey to better our performance as a responsible and sustainable business. We’re good people with good intentions and knew we needed measurable objectives to ensure we were heading in the right direction. But, as an SME with limited resources and budgets, where should we start?
Our friends at David Miller Architects suggested we get in touch with Heart of the City (HotC). HotC provide access to resources and tools to improve the environmental performance of businesses and so we worked our way through their Climate for SMEs: 4 Steps to Action programme and graduated last year.
As part of the programme, we self-evaluated our operational carbon footprint by following the steps and guidance as outlined in the HotC Roadmap to Net Zero Course. Well done to Mike, Harry and Oscar for engaging with the team and our suppliers to collate all the data to enable this. As a result, we were able to calculate our baseline footprint and develop a Net Zero Carbon Action Plan for the business.
As we neared the end of 2024, we decided that we wanted to offset out residual carbon. Harry was determined to identify an appropriate and trustworthy source to use to offset our carbon missions. After lots of research, OCO Technology was chosen – their technology decarbonises construction products. Although we are offsetting the carbon associated with our practice, not our projects, this felt like it aligns more with the core of our business and goals.
We have a practice-wide meeting scheduled for early September where we will discuss our Net Zero Action Plan, identify targets that have already been met, evaluate how we might achieve any outstanding items, start calculating our operational carbon footprint for 2025, and brainstorm where we might offset our carbon for this year. We will also be asking each member of the team to complete an individual carbon footprint assessment and suggest ways in which we might improve our individual performance for next year.
We’re no experts in this (yet!) but do reach out if you want to know more. We’ll offer as much help and top tips as we can.
