Standard used: Greenhouse Gas Protocol for companies.
Beta version of cross-sector GHG Emission Calculation Tool (Excel-template): https://ghgprotocol.org/calculation-tools#cross_sector_tools_id
Scope 1:
- Not applicable in Liberate Science’s case.
Scope 2:
- You’ll need: Invoices from electricity provider and for heating.
- To account for remote work, we listed Liberate Science’s office space as well as each individual remote employee as separate “facilities”, using the GHG Emission Calculation Tool for assigning the Grid region.
- We added three custom emission factors to account for the gridmix in Argentina, the electricity, and heating contracts in our office space, which uses 100% renewable energy and has a biogas purchase agreement, for which the emission factor can be found on the provider’s webpage: https://www.naturstrom.de/privatkunden/biogas/naturstrom-biogas/
- Remote assumptions:
- We used the average annual energy consumption for people in Germany.
- Then calculated the number of days that each employee worked during the year.
- We broadly assumed that half of each workday’s electricity and heating consumption would be accounted for by Liberate Science.
- We used the residual mix and grid average emission factors to account for these estimated kWh.
- For contractors in the Netherlands and Argentina, we calculated with the days worked for Liberate Science.
Scope 3:
- To estimate waste generated in operations, we used the data provided by BSR accounting for landfill, paper, compost, e-waste, and recycling: https://www.bsr.de/abfallrechner-23203.php
- Our actual waste is likely to be lower and we will reassess how to better track this going forward.
- We applied the emission factors provide by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Table 9): https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/documents/ghg-emission-factors-hub.pdf
- Travel:
- We did not have any travel or commute in 2021. The methodology for this would be as follows.
- To help you calculate the impact of your flights, this post is incredibly helpful: https://sheilasaia.rbind.io/post/2019-04-19-carbon-cost-calcs/
- For hotels, we use the conversion factors 2020 (full set) provided by the UK government: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/greenhouse-gas-reporting-conversion-factors-2020
- In terms of commute, we use the days that people came to the office and use the emissions accounted for by BVG (the Berlin public transport provider): https://www.unglobalcompact.org/participation/report/cop/create-and-submit/active/452308, divided by their 728 million passengers and divided by 365 days and multiply the amount with days of commute.
- Purchased Goods and Services:
- You’ll need: An inventory on everything purchased and services used is tremendously helpful.
- We checked each device or piece of furniture for manufacturing information.
- Apple, for example, provides Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) data for its products, which will tell you that a MacBook Pro 16” accounts for 394kg in emissions, cf. https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/16-inch_MacBookPro_PER_Nov2019.pdf
- We used the Neutral tool to estimate some products.
- For others, we used averages as provided by the GHG Protocol guidance: https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards_supporting/Chapter1.pdf
- For our cloud services, we worked off our invoices and information from our providers.