Carbon footprint

Purpose

Whether you are an SME or a large multinational organization, we will take your sustainability management to the next level – save you costs, assure you comply with legislation and enhance your brands.

Strengthen your position in the marketplace and gain access to emission trading and product labeling schemes by measuring, verifying and disclosing carbon footprint data. By assessing your impacts on climate change, you help satisfy customer and stakeholder demand for increased transparency, comply with appplicable legilation, inform a carbon management strategy, and enable participation in sustainability initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

Benefits

Corporate and product carbon footprints speak to the fact that we cannot manage what is not measured. Beyond responding to stakeholder or client requests, carbon footprints are a necessary first step toward voluntary emissions reduction efforts or commitments, and toward being strategically positioned for future emission reduction mandates.

Features

AIPHORIA offers a suite of carbon footprinting products and services to cost-effectively address corporate needs, including:

• Event footprints, which often need to include not only direct emissions, but also Scope 3 emissions (eg, supply-chain related emissions, event-related travel emissions, event-related lodging, and emissions from waste disposal). A credible event footprint is a prerequisite to any effort to brand an event as carbon neutral.
• Voluntary corporate footprints, which can be customized to the needs of specific circumstance and voluntary footprinting standards.
• Product footprinting or life cycle assessment (LCA), is increasingly being required by major retailers as a measure of the GHG-intensity of a product or service. LCA information is increasingly being provided to consumers in order to influence their purchasing patterns, making it crucial that companies understand and adhere to the details of such newly developed standards as PAS 2050.

 

Carbon offsetting

After preparing the types of carbon footprints profiled above, many companies will want or need to pursue offsetting of the footprint. By offsetting these emissions, you can have a carbon neutral organization, event or product. AIPHORIA can also provide carbon offsetting services.

Investing in high quality international carbon reduction projects, making your business carbon neutral and achieving your ESG and sustainability goals.

Many of the carbon offsetting projects also provide additional benefits such as biodiversity, education, jobs, food security, clean drinking water and heath & well-being in developing countries.

 

Life-cycle assessment

Life-cycle assessment is a technique to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product’s life from raw material extraction through materials processing, manufacture, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal or recycling. Designers use this process to help critique their products. LCAs can help avoid a narrow outlook on environmental concerns by:

• Compiling an inventory of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental releases;
• Evaluating the potential impacts associated with identified inputs and releases;
• Interpreting the results to help make a more informed decision.

According to the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards, a Life Cycle Assessment is carried out in four distinct phases as illustrated in the figure shown to the right. The phases are often interdependent in that the results of one phase will inform how other phases are completed.

Goal and scope

An LCA starts with an explicit statement of the goal and scope of the study, which sets out the context of the study and explains how and to whom the results are to be communicated. This is a key step and the ISO standards require that the goal and scope of an LCA be clearly defined and consistent with the intended application. The goal and scope document therefore includes technical details that guide subsequent work:

• the functional unit
• the system boundaries
• any assumptions and limitations
• the allocation methods
• the impact categories

Why and how to perform a product life cycle assessment?

The purpose of life cycle studies is to assess the environmental impacts of “potential” product substitutions (the choice of one product system instead of another).

Environmental product declarations (EPDs)

Environmental Product Declarations are based on life cycle assessment data. As a simplified form of communication, there is a danger that an EPD might mislead consumers. Choice of correct LCA data and methods is essential for a good EPD.

AIPHORIA can help you through the above-mentioned processes. 

Carbon Management Plans

Once you have established your baseline and you have started to gather performance data, it is time to begin thinking about creating a Carbon Management Plan (CMP).  A CMP brings all of the critical success factors for an effective carbon management program into one plan.  A comprehensive plan should contain the following elements:

• Carbon Strategy and Key Drivers
• Emissions Baseline and Reduction Targets
• Implementation Plan
• Governance, Monitoring and Reporting
• Projects and Initiatives Summary

Water footprint

Imagine life without clean, fresh water. That is the future for many unless we rethink how we use each drop. Yet with every mouth comes a mind and smart ideas to resolve the world’s water crises.

What is a water footprint?

Everything we use, wear, buy, sell and eat takes water to make.

The water footprint measures the amount of water used to produce each of the goods and services we use. It can be measured for a single process, such as growing rice, for a product, such as a pair of jeans, for the fuel we put in our car, or for an entire multi-national company. The water footprint can also tell us how much water is being consumed by a particular country – or globally – in a specific river basin or from an aquifer.

The water footprint is a measure of humanity’s appropriation of fresh water in volumes of water consumed and/or polluted.

The water footprint allows us to answer a broad range of questions for companies, governments and individuals. For example:

• where is the water dependence in my company’s operations or supply chain?
• how well are regulations protecting our water resources?
• how secure are our food or energy supplies?

can I do something to reduce my own water footprint and help us manage water for both people and nature?

Depending on the question you are asking, the water footprint can be measured in cubic metres per tonne of production, per hectare of cropland, per unit of currency and in other functional units.

What is Water Footprint Assessment?

Water Footprint Assessment is a four-phase process that quantifies and maps green, blue and grey water footprints, assesses the sustainability, efficiency and equitability of water use and identifies which strategic actions should be prioritised in order to make a footprint sustainable.

Water Footprint Assessment is versatile and can inform a broad range of strategic actions and policies from environmental, social and economic perspectives.

These are the four phases of Water Footprint Assessment:

1. Goals and Scope
2. Accounting
3. Sustainability Assessment
4. Response Formulation

Business water footprint

Water is a crucial resource for every business, whether you sell food, electronics, clothing or other consumer items. A business’s water footprint is a measurement of the total water consumed to produce the goods and services it provides. It is a combination of the water that goes into the production and manufacturing of a product or service and the water used throughout the supply chain, as well as during the use of the product.

Understanding your water footprint is to understand where water is important to your business and how it relates to the products you are making.

The water footprint enables companies to find out where and when water is used in their business. The water footprint of a company includes its direct (operational) water footprint and its indirect (supply-chain) water footprint.