SGi Celebrates Carbon Neutral Status
SGi want to set out its clear statement on the companies carbon footprint and look to the future with support of their staff and partners.
Early in 2020, the board of SGi set a clear goal to understand the company’s carbon footprint and its impact in climate change terms. To help us towards this goal, we engaged global sustainability consultancy Anthesis who in turn set up and delivered a series of workshops for our management and staff. As part of the initial phase of the process, SGi enrolled all its team on an accredited Carbon Literacy e-learning course. Completing this course has allowed all, including our Managing Director, to have the confidence to discuss carbon footprints, to make sense of the terminology used and to understand their own impact both in their everyday and working lives.
Anthesis also undertook an exercise to calculate our Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions for the 2020/21 financial year using the approach specified by the UK government’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) regulations and in accordance with the globally established Greenhouse Gas Protocol corporate carbon accounting standard. Scope 1 emissions are those that are generated directly from a company’s activities, such as the combustion of fuel in boilers owned or operated by the company. Scope 2 emissions are counted as those that attributable to the generation of the electricity purchased and used by the company. The results of this assessment indicated that thanks to strict policy changes instigated over the previous two years, SGI’s market-based Scope 1 and 2 footprint was already approximately 60% lower than the location-based equivalent.
Whilst this was clearly good news, we have subsequently reduced the company’s carbon footprint even further. In February 2021, SGi relocated its operation to Phoenix House in Manchester. We carefully considered the low carbon attributes of the available property such like renewable energy provision and energy efficiency in selecting our new home, and as a result the company has effectively lowered its already low Scope 1 and 2 emissions even further. To complete the exercise we are also purchasing high-quality carbon offsets to balance our FY 2021 carbon footprint. In all, this means that SGi is currently operating as a Carbon-Neutral business.
The next stage of our journey is already underway as we have now engaged Anthesis to measure our Scope 3 emissions as we work towards our ultimate target of achieving Net Zero Carbon, and hopefully, Carbon Negative status in the coming years. Scope 3 emissions are the upstream and downstream GHGs that are attributable to the company’s extended value chain. With the help of the data and insights that we acquire, we will set reduction targets for both our operational and value chain emissions to 2030 in line with a science-based approach that correspond to a 1.5 degree C temperature warming by the end of the century, as advocated by the United Nations Paris agreement.