This document describes the actions businesses can take to make a meaningful reduction in their impact on the climate. It has been developed by Sage with small businesses in mind, and is linked to the Sage Earth Carbon Accounting engine. You don’t need to complete a carbon footprint to start reducing your emissions, but it will help you to focus your attention wherever your own emissions are coming from.

It is not really intended to be read from top to bottom, but if that’s how you want to use it, that’s absolutely fine. The aim is to provide enough information to get started (or see that a particular topic is not relevant for you), but not so much information that you get bogged down. It is not difficult to find any amount of detail about any of the topics covered with a quick search of the internet, but it can be difficult to separate the truth from the hype, and what actually works from the fabulous claims.

That’s what we have sought to do here. It draws on many decades of experience from energy, environmental and other practitioners. It is regularly updated, so if you disagree with anything we have written, or would like to contribute, please get in touch.

The main aim of this document is to help small businesses reduce their impact on the climate. It can be difficult to isolate this impact from others that are closely associated with it, such as the mass extinction of species we are causing through habitat destruction and the proliferation of destructive agricultural practices, such as dairy, beef and sheep farming.

After the threat of nuclear war, climate breakdown is the greatest threat to humanity, but the destruction of the natural world is a close second, and the two are inextricably entwined [1] . Nonetheless, this document is intended to address the impact of businesses on the climate, by identifying where that impact comes from, and suggesting ways it can be reduced.

The stable climate that people have enjoyed throughout history is breaking down as a result of human activities; mainly the burning of fossil fuels. If we carry on as we are now, the damage we are doing will kill billions, cost trillions, and soon (in a century or two) lead to the collapse of society.

The good news is that this doesn't have to happen. We know what the problems are, we know what is causing climate change, and we know what to do about it. We have all the solutions we need, all we need to do now is implement them.

In 2016, almost every country in the world agreed to keep global warming to well below two degrees above pre-industrial levels, with a target of 1.5 degrees. This was a compromise between what climate science required, and what was considered politically possible. The 1.5 degree target has already been breached.

Missing this target is enormously damaging, but it doesn’t mean that we should give up. Every bit of global warming we can avoid is a huge win.

Table 21: Sky videos showing impact of various levels of global warming. Things have only got worse in the ten years since these were made.

The UK's response to the Paris Agreement was to amend the Climate Change Act. This was originally passed in 2008, with a target to reduce net emissions by 80% by 2050. This was increased to 100% in 2019, resulting in the Net Zero commitment. This is a legally binding commitment on the UK government to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050. This means that any remaining emissions will be balanced by greenhouse gases being removed from the atmosphere (e.g. by planting trees).

The Climate Change Act also established the Climate Change Committee. This is an independent body which models UK emissions, sets interim carbon budgets and makes recommendations to Parliament for how these budgets can be achieved.

Figure 2.1: CCC Seventh Carbon Budget Report

Most discussion about climate breakdown refers to carbon dioxide emissions, most of which come from burning fossil fuels. However, carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. There are a couple of other major ones, and hundreds of less common, but sometimes significant ones.

For our purposes, what is important is knowing how the climate impact of each gas compares, and for this purpose we have a common unit: kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (kgCO2e). One kilogram of carbon dioxide has a global warming potential (GWP) of 1 kgCO2e, but some gases are many times more powerful. The highest is sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) which has a GWP of 23,500. This means that releasing one kilogram of SF6 into the atmosphere would cause as much global warming as 23,500 kg of CO2.

Most high-GWP gases are not as bad as this, but there are many commonly used gases (mainly refrigerants used in chillers, air conditioning and heat pumps) which have a high enough GWP that normal leakage rates can add up to a significant proportion of your carbon footprint. These are discussed in more detail in Section 7.3.1.1.

A little further detail is required to explain the GWP of methane (CH4). Methane is the main component of “natural gas” and is also generated by enteric fermentation (digestion) in cows. Methane is highly effective at trapping heat, so is a potent greenhouse gas, but it is also very reactive, breaking down naturally in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide does break down, but on such a long timescale that it can be ignored for practical purposes. This means that the carbon dioxide equivalent of methane depends on the timescale you are talking about.

When we say “GWP,” what we normally mean is “GWP100” or GWP over a timescale of 100 years. By this measure, the GWP of methane is about 28. But the GWP of methane over 20 years (GWP20) is 84. This means that the potential for reducing climate impact by reducing methane in the short term is far greater than is generally realised. Stop burning fossil fuels and the methane leaks associated with their production disappear. Stop eating beef and lamb, and the effect is much the same (although the biodiversity benefits of freeing up all that land are also enormous).

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol [2] (GHG Protocol) was first developed in 1998, since when it has been internationally recognised and universally adopted. All other greenhouse gas reporting standards (e.g. ISO 14064, PAS 2050, PCAF, ISSB) are based on the Protocol.

The GHG Protocol first established the principle of Scopes:

3.1 Supplied Goods and Services (e.g. raw materials, ingredients, products, services etc.);

3.2 Capital Goods (as 3.1, but for large purchases);

3.3 Fuel and Energy Related Activities (e.g. methane leaks from gas pipelines, transmission losses from electricity grid);

3.4 Upstream transportation and distribution (getting things to you);

3.5 Waste generated in operations (transport and treatment of waste);

3.6 Business Travel (all travel on behalf of the business);

3.7 Employee Commuting and Working from Home (travel to work, and emissions from working at home);

3.8 Emissions from upstream Leased Assets (scope 1 and 2 emissions only, from e.g. leased offices);

3.9 Downstream Transportation and Distribution (emissions from getting your products to customers, and from warehousing);

3.10 Processing of Sold Products (emissions from intermediate processing of products, e.g. from the manufacture of phones, if your company sells memory chips);

3.11 Use of Sold Products (emissions from the use of products, e.g. from charging phones, if your company sells phones);

3.12 End-of-life Treatment of Sold Products (emissions from recycling, incineration, landfill: whatever happens to your product at the end of its life);

3.13 Downstream Leased Assets (scope 1 and 2 emissions only, e.g. from an office that you rent out, if you are the landlord);

3.14 Franchises (emissions from franchises, where you are the franchisor);

3.15 Investments (e.g. emissions from investments, jointly owned companies).

There are also two “out of scopes” categories (upstream and downstream) which are used to harmonise international reporting conventions with business foot printing. These are mostly used to account correctly for the emissions from burning biomass. In international accounting conventions, these emissions are considered to be zero, as they are balanced by the carbon dioxide drawn down by regrowth, but in reality, this is nonsense: the two are unrelated, and combustion emissions happen now, while drawdown may happen over many decades.

Figure 2.2 also shows the six main greenhouse gases (or classes of gas), which are discussed in Section 2.1.4, and illustrates the concept of upstream and downstream emissions. Upstream emissions are all those emissions that are incurred to create your product or service; downstream emissions are generated by your product or service.

Figure 2.2: GHG Protocol Scopes and Categories

This is a very brief introduction to the complexities of the GHG Protocol, which can get very complicated. For our purposes, its relevance is:

As well as making a critical contribution to the maintenance of a habitable climate on our only planet, the decarbonisation of the global economy will result in huge, related benefits (e.g. cleaner air, less pollution, reduced impact on nature etc.) and huge economic wins for the vast majority of people.

It will, however, result in losses too: principally a loss of wealth, power and influence for petrostates, the fossil fuel industry and the governments, media and other organisations which support it. These incumbents are actively trying to thwart initiatives to save the planet by various means, including the deliberate spreading of disinformation[3].

Throughout this document, we have referred to reputable sources to demonstrate the points made, so that statements made here can be relied upon. We considered highlighting where disinformation campaigns have tried to undermine the truth, but in the end it’s simply not possible to keep up, and we didn’t want to give any more publicity to this dangerous nonsense.

Our use of energy gives us superhuman abilities, and underpins the exponential increases in population, standard of living, life expectancy and a whole raft of other metrics that has been seen in the past handful of decades. Unfortunately, it is also responsible for critical damage to the planetary systems we depend on to survive.

Figure 3.1 shows that almost three-quarters of all greenhouse gas emissions come from energy use. But this is actually good news, as we already have solutions that can replace the damaging energy sources we use just now, and they are also much cleaner, and much cheaper.

Figure 3.1: Greenhouse gas emissions by sector.

There are several sources of energy that we commonly use. Figure 3.2 shows how our use of these sources has changed over the years: first just biomass (timber, straw etc.), then the fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), and more recently, low-carbon energy sources such as nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar. The chart shows how global energy supply is still dominated by fossil fuel use, and how the very rapid development of low-carbon energy in recent years has not slowed the increase in fossil fuel consumption.

Incidentally, “natural gas” is a marketing term designed to make the stuff more appealing. The word “natural” has no meaning in this context. It’s 95% methane with a few other hydrocarbon gases mixed in. Natural gas is less bad than other fossil fuels in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but it is itself a potent greenhouse gas, and capturing, processing, and delivering it is a leaky process

Figure 3.2: Global primary energy by source

Figure 3.2 is primary energy, which is an important distinction. When you use fossil fuels for heating, you get to use most of the energy available in the fuel (over 90% for an efficient and well-maintained boiler), but if you use them for anything else (moving a car, generating steam in a factory, or electricity in a power station) you lose about half of the energy as heat

Figure 3.3: Primary energy and energy services

What you want is not primary energy, it’s “energy services.” This is the ability to turn a turbine or vehicle axle to do useful work. Doing this with renewable energy is about twice as efficient as doing it with fossil fuels, because you don’t waste half the available energy as heat.

Hydrogen is often proposed as an alternative to natural gas for domestic heating (and the many industrial processes which are functionally comparable). This gives us an excellent opportunity to illustrate the principle of energy services, by looking at the system efficiency of hydrogen-based domestic heating.

Figure 3.4: System efficiency of hydrogen compared to other systems. Source: LETI Hydrogen Report.

Today, 96% of hydrogen is made by reforming natural gas (blue hydrogen), which can provide heating with 58% efficiency. Using this natural gas to generate electricity, then using that electricity to run a heat pump, would result in a system efficiency of 173%. The hydrogen lobby proposes to replace this “blue hydrogen” with “green hydrogen” generated from renewable electricity. This would reduce the system efficiency compared to using “blue hydrogen” from 58% to 46%. Using that same renewable electricity to run a heat pump would increase this to 270%.

Hydrogen has some niche uses (see Figure 3.5), but for almost every use, there are better alternatives.

Figure 3.5: The hydrogen ladder. Source: Liebreich Associates

Fossil fuels are used extensively for a huge range of purposes, including transport (petrol, diesel, CNG, LPG), generating electricity (coal, oil, gas), industrial processes (those requiring high temperatures such as steel and cement, and for raising steam), and for heating.

For almost all these purposes, there is a lower-carbon alternative which is better. Usually this uses electricity, but there are some niche uses where hydrogen works better.

Figure 3.6: Electric alternatives to conventional industrial power sources.

For most small businesses, the main use of non-electrical energy is for space heating (in both offices and factory spaces) and hot water (for domestic and process uses), which is usually achieved using a gas-fired (and less often, oil-fired) boiler. In almost all these cases, changing the boiler for a heat pump is the best option for reducing emissions (and ultimately, costs), see Section 3.5.6.2. However, there is usually plenty that can be done with a fossil fuel boiler to at least make it more efficient. See Section 5.2.

District heating is a system which uses a combination of large, utility scale heat sources and a heat main (an insulated pipe carrying hot water) to provide heat to a whole area. The heat main can be fed by a single source, or several, and these can include conventional fossil fuel boilers, waste heat from industrial processes, or large-scale renewable energy systems, like river-source heat pumps.

District heating is generally an excellent idea, and a great way to provide heat to entire neighbourhoods, but it does depend on what source is used to provide the heat in the first place. If you have an opportunity to connect to a district heating system, this will usually be your best option. Even if it is currently powered by fossil fuel, there should be a credible plan to decarbonise the heat source soon.

The sections above give you some tips on how to make existing fossil-based energy systems more efficient, but for almost every application, it is already better for the climate to use electricity, rather than any other fuel. And as electricity generation gets cleaner, this difference grows. So, to achieve Net Zero, we want to increase electricity consumption as we shift from fossil fuels. Then we want to reduce it by being more efficient.

Apart from solar, all electricity is generated by turning a generator.

A generator is just the same as an electric motor. If you put electricity into a motor, it turns; if you turn it, electricity comes out. The energy you need to make it turn usually comes from a steam turbine. The steam is made by heating water, which you can do using anything that burns (rubbish, wood, coal, oil, gas), or even nuclear fission (nuclear fusion doesn't quite work commercially yet, but when it does, it will also work by heating steam to run a turbine). You can also move the turbine by attaching it to a big propeller in the air (wind power) or water (hydro, and most tidal).

Solar power is generated in a couple of ways. Concentrated solar power focusses a load of mirrors at a boiler to raise steam and, yes, drive a turbine. Solar photovoltaic generation is what you see on rooftops (and in fields or floating on reservoirs). Solar panels generate electricity directly from the action of the sun on the panels.

Electricity itself has no impact on the climate, but generating it can do. If the electricity you use is generated by a turbine powered by burning fossil fuels, then it does. If no fossil fuels are used, then it doesn't. 

There is some climate impact from building, maintaining and recycling any electricity generating equipment, so even if there is no impact at all from generating renewable electricity, there is still some impact associated with using it. But this is much lower than the impact from electricity generated from fossil fuels.

Figure 3.7: World electricity production by fuel source

All the electricity you use comes from the grid. This is the network of power lines that crosses the country, connecting all the power stations to all the electricity users.

It's a bit like a bath with a lot of taps and a lot of drains, except that in this bath, some of the taps are only on when it's been rainy for a while, some only when it's windy, some when it's sunny. Some can be turned on and off very quickly, while others pretty much have to stay fully on all the time. Meanwhile, the drains can open and close as much as, and whenever they like. The network operators' job is to make sure that the amount of water going into the bath is the same as the amount going in.

They do this using a lot of modelling and planning, and by paying very high prices when they really need a bit more power. Recently, it has also become possible to pay people to switch things off in these situations.

Because the electricity you take out of the grid is generated by whatever power stations happen to be on at the time, it's a matter of some debate whether a "green tariff" has much meaning.

The UK has reduced greenhouse gas emissions faster than any major economy, mainly through closing coal-fired power stations and offshoring manufacturing. The UK Government has committed to build on this achievement by implementing the Clean Power by 2030 Plan, reducing the carbon intensity of electricity generation from 171 gCO2e/kWh in 2023 to well below 50 gCO2e/kWh in 2030.

This means that the best way for businesses to reduce their climate impact is by switching industrial processes (as well as office lighting, heating and cooling) to electricity, and reducing the amount of electricity they use.

In the UK, electricity pricing is based on the cost of the most expensive generation technology in use at a particular time. If the final 10% of demand has to come from gas, all electricity sold at that time gets the price for gas-powered generation.

The UK also has the highest “spark gap” in Europe. The spark gap (Figure 3.8) is the additional burden of infrastructure and climate policy costs which are charged on electricity, but not gas. Given the lower climate impact of electricity, this makes no logical sense, and it is changing. UK electricity market reform will see this gap close, as the policy cost burden is shifted to the higher carbon energy source.

Figure 3.8: The "spark gap."

This makes UK electricity the most expensive in Europe (Figure 3.9).

Figure 3.9: Electricity prices across Europe

The impact of the UK’s unusual electricity market can be seen in Figure 3.10, which plots the prevalence of heat pumps against the relative cost of electricity compared to gas.

Figure 3.10: Heat pump sales as a function of relative energy costs. Source: EHPA 2024

90% of industrial processes can be electrified [4], resulting in reduced emissions and, as electricity costs fall, reduced costs.

Figure 3.11: Potential for electrification of industrial processes. Source: Fraunhofer Institute 2024.

A range of technologies covers all but the very highest of temperatures required.

Figure 3.12: Temperature range achievable by different industrial electrification technologies. Source: Fraunhofer Institute 2024.

For our purposes, these very high temperatures are not usually required, and are highly specialised cases. The following sections describe the electrification of processes typically used by small and medium businesses in the UK.

Like for like replacement of gas or oil boilers with direct electric heating is a simple way for small businesses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy costs. Technologies like electric boilers and geysers can be used as a drop-in replacement for traditional fossil fuel systems. These electric options are cheap, efficient, easy to install, and can be used for various heating needs. By switching to direct electric heating, businesses can lower their carbon footprint and take advantage of potential energy savings.

In combination with time-of-use tariffs, an electric boiler combined with an insulated hot water storage tank can provide cheap hot water with very low emissions.

Heat pumps are an amazing technology that is much misunderstood, and much maligned by the UK press (which is largely owned by fossil fuel interests). The technology has been around since the middle of the nineteenth century, and is exactly the same as that used for refrigeration.

Taken from your meter point, direct electric heating is 100% efficient because any inefficiency results in energy lost as heat, which is what you wanted anyway. (There are losses in generating and distributing electricity to get it to your meter point, which are described in Section 3.5.3). Where heat pumps seem like magic is that their efficiency is always more than 100%, and usually more than 300%. How can this be possible?

The trick is that a heat pump is pulling in heat from its source. This can be the surrounding air, the ground, a nearby river, industrial waste heat, mine water; really anything that has any amount of heat in it. Efficiency is calculated by comparing what you put into what you get out, so if you put 1kW of electricity into a heat pump and get 3kW of heat, the efficiency is 300%.

The magic is really quite simple. Every heat pump contains a fluid which is pumped around a circuit. Where you want to add heat to the fluid, it is allowed to evaporate (still contained within the pipework); this causes its temperature to drop below the level of the heat source, so it heats up when exposed to that heat source (e.g. through a radiator with a fan, or a coil of buried pipe). This slightly warmer gas is then pumped back around and recompressed. This raises its temperature above the temperature of whatever you want to heat (such as your hot water tank), so it warms it a little. The raising and lowering of the temperature of the fluid allows you to “pump” heat from a cooler to a hotter medium.

As described in Section 3.2.1, using a heat pump increases system efficiency by around three times compared to conventional energy sources. They are particularly useful for relatively low-temperature uses (such as hot water and space heating) but there are also specialist industrial heat pumps which are designed to deliver higher temperatures for process use.

See EVs

Electricity use and costs are calculated in a bewildering number of different ways, which can make it difficult to understand what you are being charged for, and what you can do about it. It can help to clarify the units used, as this can shed light on what is going on:

MPAN. Your Meter Point Administration Number is written on your bill. It is a unique identifier: one per connection point. It is different from your meter serial number, which is usually on a sticker, or printed directly on your meter. You could have more than one meter on a single MPAN, for example if you have a three phase supply fitted with three separate single phase meters, each with its own serial number.

Figure 3.13: An example of an MPAN

You can look up your MPAN here: https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/who-is-my-electricity-supplier-and-what-is-my-mpan.

Your MPAN also includes some embedded information which can be helpful. This is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meter_Point_Administration_Number.

Serial number. Each meter has a unique serial number. This is unique to the actual meter, rather than the connection point. Its format depends on the manufacturer and model of your meter.

Part of your bill is charged on a daily basis (often referred to as a standing charge). It makes no difference how much electricity you use, or when you use it: daily charges stay the same. They are charged per MPAN, so you can reduce them by consolidating connection points, if you have more than you need. Different suppliers have different daily standing charges, so you can save some money by switching supplier, but it's very unlikely that this would make a material difference to your overall bill.

Kilowatt-hours, or "units" of electricity. This is the standard unit of electricity demand. Use twice as much, you use twice as many kWh, and will be charged twice as much. A wide range of different elements are included in the total charge, but there is not much you can do to reduce this part of your bill, other than reducing the amount of electricity that you use (or switching to a cheaper supplier).

Over the coming years, many of the additional costs that have been loaded onto electricity costs (such as the Renewable Obligations Charge, Feed in Tariff etc.) will be shifted onto gas instead, reducing the difference in price, and encouraging users to shift to electricity.

This unit is used for the reserved capacity charge. This does what it sounds like: you pay to reserve a certain amount of the electricity supply capacity available locally. If you reserve more than you need, you pay too much. If you reserve less than you need, and use more than your reserved capacity, there is a penalty charge. The trick is to review your bills over a representative period, see what your maximum demand has been, add a sensible margin, then set your reserved capacity at that.

You may have noticed that your bill includes both kW (or at least kWh) and kVA. And you may know that a volt times an amp equals a watt, so what's the difference between kW and kVA? Surely they should be the same?

The difference is caused by Reactive Power. This is complicated, but it relates to the magnetic fields generated in a cable by the electricity flowing through it, which themselves then generate electricity in the cable. The result is that you don't always get to use all the power that's flowing through your meter. Particularly if you have heavy machinery that switches on and off frequently, the electricity you get useful work out of can be significantly less than what you are paying for. 

This discrepancy is called the Power Factor (or PF) and it may be itemised on your bill as a number less than 1. A power factor of 1 means that you are getting use out of everything you have paid for, 0.75 means that a quarter of it is going to waste. You can fix this to a certain extent by planning start-up and shut-down of heavy machinery, or you can fix it completely by installing power factor correction equipment. It's quite straightforward to calculate how much this would save, and local suppliers will quote you how much it will cost.

Even if PF is not itemised on your bill, you may be being charged for Reactive Power. This is a different way of describing the same thing, and the same remedies apply.

Time-of-use tariffs have come on considerably since the days of Economy 7, but the principle is still the same. Electricity suppliers can buy wholesale electricity more cheaply when demand is low, so they offer a lower price at these times. Customers that can use electricity at these times can take advantage of much lower prices. As times of low demand also tend to be times of low grid carbon intensity, this is also a great way to reduce emissions. These tariffs are aimed at the domestic user, but are also available for business users, although you may have to contact suppliers directly.

Most offer a single period (e.g. between midnight and 05:00) which is aimed at owners of electric vehicles; some offer two periods (e.g. 05:00-09:00 and 13:00-16:00) and are aimed at owners of heat pumps. The difficulty is, it’s hard to run a business only during these hours. However, if you can store energy to use later in your process, then time-of-use tariffs can be very effective.

The simplest (and cheapest) way to store energy is as hot water, but if this is not useful then battery storage can also be cost-effective. Batteries need to be used to pay for themselves. You can calculate how much a battery installation will save you annually by multiplying the difference in tariff between charging and discharging times by the capacity of the battery, and multiplying the result by the number of times it will do that in a year.

Whatever source of energy you are using, the first step in improving efficiency is to measure your use.

As discussed in Section 3.5.7, just looking at your monthly electricity bills, and understanding what they mean, is a good start, but at best, this only tells you your total monthly consumption. It doesn’t tell you when during the month you used that energy, where it was used, or what it was used for. Once you know all this, you will be in a much better position to work out what to do. In fact, this applies not only to energy use, but also other utilities (e.g. water and effluent), as well as other activities (e.g. travel, transport, commuting) and services (e.g. waste).

Most electricity billing is now done via smart meter, but there are still plenty of “dumb” meters around. A dumb meter just records use all the time; to get any useful information out of it, you have to read it and write down the time and value of the reading. If you do have a dumb meter, it is usually still worth doing this twice a day, as this will show give you enough data to show some trends, such as seasonal variation in consumption, changes in use with increased production, and baseload (e.g. overnight demand when the site is closed). However, one of the best actions any business owner can take if they don’t have a smart meter, is to ask for one. Installation is free: just call your electricity supplier.

Smart meters don’t only measure electricity. You can also get them on your gas supply, and even water supply and effluent discharge. A smart meter measures demand all the time too, just like a dumb meter, but it also records the reading regularly (usually every half hour) and transmits this data to a central server. You can then request your consumption data, and a full year of half-hourly data is an excellent source of information to start analysing where your energy (or water) is going.

Once you have a smart meter, real-time monitoring and reporting software can be used to keep an eye on electricity use, sending automated alarms when normal operating conditions are exceeded, and sending regular automated reports to allow regular monitoring of trends in electricity consumption. These can then be included in weekly management meetings, comparing against e.g. production output, occupancy or other relevant denominators.

Smart meter data has great resolution in time, but in space it is still restricted to a single point. All it tells you is how much electricity has passed through your meter point. Circuit meters allow you to go one step further by measuring consumption as finely as you like, down to each individual mains circuit, or even finer.

Circuit meters come in a few different formats. Most are available in DIN rail format, so they can be installed in a normal mains distribution box. They may measure power flowing through the unit itself (which is neat, but restricted to e.g. 16A per circuit), or through a current clamp which is placed around the cable you want to measure. Current clamps have the advantage of being non-invasive: you don’t have to modify your wiring at all, you just clamp them around the existing cables.

Figure 4.1: Example of an in-line circuit meter

Figure 4.2: Example of a current-clamp circuit meter

You can even get meters which are in the format of a standard electrical socket, so you could put a meter on everything. Although this level of monitoring is wonderful, try not to get too carried away, as these units are not cheap, and it will take you quite a while to recoup their cost if you don’t target their installation.

Figure 4.3: Example of a single socket meter (UK standard)

These systems all connect either directly to WiFi, or via a specialised internal network system, such as Z-Wave. They come with apps and web applications which allow you to monitor consumption, and download data for more detailed analysis.

How you go about analysing your data depends a lot on what data you have, and your own preferences and capabilities. Generally, the best approach is to use a spreadsheet. Most businesses have some form of spreadsheet software (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets). If you don’t, subscriptions are quite affordable, and there are alternatives (e.g. Airtable, Smartsheet, Zoho) and even free packages (Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice).

The simplest and most powerful analysis method for most datasets is to create a graph, with the baseline being a relevant timescale (e.g. week, month or year) along the x-axis, and demand on the y-axis. All spreadsheet packages have functionality to help create such graphs, and they help to provide a quick visual representation of patterns in demand.

As datasets become more complex (e.g. half-hourly billing data for a year), the same approach applies, but it can be difficult to handle so much data in a useable format; in particular, a year’s half-hourly billing is too many datapoints for Excel to plot. A useful trick for these datasets is to arrange the data in one day per row, with 365 rows forming a year, then apply conditional formatting to the whole array and zoom out until it is all visible. This results in something like this:

Figure 4.4: Example of one year's half-hourly electricity demand.

At a glance, you can see shift patterns (full time Mon-Thu, short day Fri, half day Saturday and closed Sunday) and the trades holiday. You can also see the demand overnight, on Sundays and over the holidays, which is reduced, but still far from zero. This baseload demand is often unnecessary: it is simply the result of equipment being left on when it is not needed. Each facility has its own pattern, which must be cross-referenced with activities on site to identify opportunities for further investigation.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol recognises two calculation methodologies for estimating emissions from the use of electricity: location-based and market-based. The location-based methodology assumes that the emissions caused by any business getting a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity from the grid at a particular moment are the same. This makes sense, as the electricity fed into the grid at any moment will have a carbon intensity based on the mix of power stations in use at that moment (long-distance transmission issues notwithstanding). The market-based methodology considers things differently: if your electricity supplier buys wholesale renewable energy and sells it on to your business, you can say that your electricity consumption has zero emissions.

The difficulty with this approach is that suppliers need only balance supply and demand over a year, and the certificates which prove that the electricity they buy is green (Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin, or REGOs) can be sold separately from the electricity itself (referred to as “unbundled”). This means there is nothing to stop an electricity supplier from buying whatever electricity is available, then adding up how many REGOs they need at the end of the year to make it seem green (on paper). Their customers will carry on their business activities on calm nights when the grid is supplied mainly by gas-fired power stations, and the supplier will buy REGOs generated when the wind was blowing and the sun was shining to make them feel good about it. Put simply, if you believe this, you can run your factory all night on solar power.

The problem is that, while this is legal, it is also nonsense: specifically, it doesn’t drive decarbonisation. In fact, there is concern that being on a green tariff leads consumers to use more electricity, as they believe it has no impact. As it has exactly the same impact as any other tariff, green tariffs effectively contribute to higher emissions. There is a further problem that, if you believe some businesses are using the green electricity, then the electricity used by the other businesses should appear to be dirtier. But there is no mechanism to account for this, so these emissions are under-counted.

The normal method of calculating location-based emissions from electricity use is to use a single annual grid carbon intensity figure (supplied by the government in the UK) and multiply it by annual electricity consumption. This gives you a reasonable average figure, but it overlooks a lot of specific information about your own consumption: specifically, when did you use it? If your business mainly uses electricity overnight, you are unlikely to get much benefit from solar generation. If most of your electricity consumption is in the summer, then wind power will do you little good. As discussed in Section 3.5.7.6, the greatest variations in grid carbon intensity are caused by demand, rather than supply. How does your electricity consumption compare to peak demand times?

There are two ways to get a more accurate estimate of your emissions from electricity use.

If you are using the location-based methodology, the best way is to use your smart meter data, combined with your local grid carbon intensity data. This can be downloaded from the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO). Combining these two datasets, you can calculate the emissions from your use of electricity in your area, when you used it, with a resolution of half an hour.

This not only gives you an accurate estimate of the emissions associated with electricity use, it also allows you to see hotspots and trends in those emissions over time, and to link those back to trends in electricity consumption. This, in turn, allows you to identify actions you can take to reduce electricity demand where it will have most effect.

If you want to reduce your emissions by purchasing a green tariff, you need to know the emissions that are really associated with the electricity you actually use. This is often referred to as Carbon Free Energy (CFE%). If at any moment a supplier buys at least as much renewable electricity (and bundled REGOs) as they sell to their customers (and provided generation and demand are not separated by constrained transmission infrastructure), their CFE% is 100. If they only buy enough to supply half the demand, their CFE is 50. And of course, at any moment CFE% cannot be more than 100%, so average CFE will always be less than 100%.

Claiming that your CFE is 100 because you’re on a green tariff isn’t true. That's why Sage’s emissions calculation methodology only uses the location-based methodology to calculate Scope 2 emissions. We have had the functionality to use the market-based methodology for years, but without meaningful CFE data, the results would be misleading, so it has never been used. However, in a recent development, the supplier that invented the green tariff, Good Energy, has developed an open-source standard which includes this information. The Good Green Supply [5] standard includes three measures:

We are not endorsing any one supplier, but if you have a green tariff, you should ask your supplier to provide this information. The last point, time-matched green, will give you the figure you need to calculate your emissions. At the time of writing, Good Energy is the only supplier to have complied with the standard they developed, and their time-matching is 90%. If your supplier cannot provide this data, you should assume that they are not complying with it, you should use the location-based methodology to calculate emissions from electricity, and you should take action to reduce these emissions based on the grid carbon intensity in your area, at the time that you use electricity.

Once you have a handle on measuring your energy consumption, and analysing when and where it is being used, this usually results in some ideas for how to reduce it. These are of course specific to your own situation, but the following sections suggest some ideas that are often helpful, some of which you may not have considered.

The first, cheapest and most effective efficiency measure is staff training. Simply explaining to staff for example where energy is used, and wasted, and what the costs and impacts are, is often a powerful motivator of change.

However, a far greater impact still can be achieved using the insights of social psychology to increase the traction of any training given [6]. Try using these principles to increase the effectiveness of actions you take both internally and externally.

The principle of reciprocation is rooted in the social norm that obligates us to return favours. This can be seen in various contexts where free samples or gifts create a sense of indebtedness, prompting us to reciprocate by making a purchase, or acting in a particular way. The power of reciprocation lies in its ability to trigger a sense of obligation, making people more likely to comply with requests. The scale of the reciprocal action seems to be largely independent of the scale of the original gift.

An example might be giving employees or customers a low-cost sustainable item (e.g. an LED bulb or smart plug) together with an explanation of why energy saving is important and how to achieve it. Later, ask them to sign a pledge to measure and reduce energy consumption (see Consistency).

This principle emphasises the human desire to be consistent with our past actions and commitments. Once we commit to something, whether verbally or in writing, we are more likely to follow through to maintain a consistent self-image. This can be leveraged by encouraging small initial commitments that pave the way for larger ones. For example, signing up to a commitment to save energy can lead people to act in a way that is consistent with their earlier commitment.

This principle can be used to encourage employees or customers to take significant steps, by starting small. Once a tiny commitment has been made, it is easy to secure a more meaningful commitment, as it is consistent with the original position. An example might be to explain how important it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to ask customers to sign up to a simple pledge. This requires no action, but it establishes consistency, so that they will be more receptive to a subsequent suggestion, such as undertaking an energy audit.

Social proof is the phenomenon where people look to others to determine how to act, especially in ambiguous situations. This principle is often used in advertising and social media, where testimonials, reviews, and popularity indicators (like follower counts) influence our decisions. Seeing others engage in a behaviour makes us more likely to do the same, as we assume that the collective behaviour is correct. To encourage the uptake of new behaviours, the same effect can be achieved with figures showing a rising trend in that behaviour.

One particular aspect of social proof which is worth emphasising is more negative: if you try to get people to change their behaviour by telling them that an unwanted behaviour is happening too much, this will backfire. For example, telling employees that littering is a huge problem can often result in more littering, as you have just provided social proof that littering is commonplace. It is far more effective to have someone influential and/or popular visibly tidy up, and then be seen to pick up litter, and dispose of litter responsibly, as this provides social proof that littering is not happening (as the area is tidy), while using liking and authority to encourage behavioural change.

The liking principle is based on the idea that we are more easily influenced by people we like. Factors that enhance liking include physical attractiveness, similarity, compliments, and familiarity. For instance, salespeople often try to build rapport and find common ground with potential customers to increase their chances of making a sale. The more we like someone, the more we are inclined to agree with them and be persuaded by their requests.

Compliments are a powerful aspect of this principle. Simply finding an opportunity to compliment a colleague on their green behaviour has a double impact: it increases the degree to which they like you, as you have given them a compliment; but it also helps them to identify themselves as the sort of person who behaves in that way (see Consistency), locking them into a cycle of increasingly green behaviour.

It is useful to bear in mind the liking principle when establishing climate champions. These are people within an organisation who take responsibility for championing projects to reduce climate emissions. Selecting people who are well liked within an organisation will mean that this approach is more likely to succeed.

The authority principle highlights our tendency to obey and be influenced by authority figures. This can be seen in various domains, such as medicine, where doctors' recommendations are highly trusted, or in advertising, where endorsements by experts lend credibility to products. The presence of authority symbols, like uniforms or titles, can significantly enhance the persuasive power of a message.

In a work context, the example set by senior management is an effective use of the authority principle. This is another principle where the power of negative behaviour is important: for example, if senior management are encouraging everyone to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but still jetting off around the world all the time, it can fatally undermine the message you want to get across.

Scarcity is the principle that people value things more when they perceive them to be limited or rare. This can drive urgency and prompt quick decision-making. Marketers often use scarcity tactics, such as limited-time offers or exclusive products, to create a sense of urgency and increase demand. The fear of missing out (FOMO) can be a powerful motivator, pushing people to act quickly to secure scarce resources.

Unfortunately, this principle does not seem to apply to the limited remaining opportunity to avert climate breakdown. This is likely because it is trumped by Consistency, Social Proof, Liking and Authority, all of which have been hijacked by the fossil fuel industry to persuade people that climate change is nothing to worry about. One way of getting around this is to show people that they are wrong about how much people care about these issues. A good resource for this is the 89% project, which demonstrates that, while most people think that green views are a minority, they are actually the overwhelming majority[7]. Once the majority recognise that they are the majority, it will become much more difficult to co-opt these principles to reduce resistance to ecocidal business models.

The scarcity principle can be used to promote engagement with climate initiatives by offering incentives and prizes. An excellent example is measuring fuel efficiency and offering a prize to the most efficient driver.

Unity refers to the influence of shared identity and connection. When we perceive someone as part of our group or community, we are more likely to be influenced by them. This principle underscores the importance of belonging and shared experiences. For example, campaigns that emphasise community values or shared goals can foster a sense of unity and enhance persuasive efforts.

This is the principle that underpins the effectiveness of case studies: if someone just like you has done something and benefited from it, you are much more likely to take the same action than you would be if it was suggested to you by a salesman.

A suggestion box is a good way of using the unity principle, as the suggestions come from employees, so are by definition from “people like us.” A suggestion box also makes use of employees’ deep understanding of business processes. It can also be combined with a prize or other incentive.

For most businesses, maintaining a comfortable temperature to work in is the most immediate energy efficiency issue, and for most businesses in the UK, this service is still provided by a gas (or sometimes oil) boiler. Ultimately, these need to go, but immediately, there are plenty of things you can do to reduce their cost and impact.

Before worrying about the efficiency of your boiler for space heating, start by reducing the amount of heat required. Usually (in the UK at least), the purpose of a building is to keep the inside warmer than it is outside. This usually means heating up the air inside, and then stopping it, or its heat, from escaping. (“Usually” because radiative heating is meant to heat objects, such as people, directly, rather than heating the air they are in.)

The heat that you have paid for escapes in two main ways: either the hot air itself escapes, or the air stays behind while the heat escapes. These are called ventilation and insulation losses.

Ventilation losses come openings like doors and windows, either when they are open, or when they are closed but they don’t fit very well. Open doors and windows can be addressed through awareness-raising, notices and self-closing mechanisms. For manufacturing areas which need access for delivery vehicles, fast-acting roller doors are effective.

A good way to identify leaks is to walk around your facility on a windy day, and a candle can be helpful for identifying subtle gaps. These can then be filled with a range of draft-stripping solutions, such as rolls of adhesive-backed brush or foam which are placed in the gap.

Finally, many facilities have air extraction fans. These range from small units used in toilets, to large industrial units. The job they are doing is to remove smells, humidity, dust or fumes, but a side-effect is that they also remove warm air, which is replaced by cold air from outside. This can be addressed by fitting heat recovery. The range of options for heat recovery matches the range of extraction systems: you can get small, individual units suitable for kitchens and toilets, or large industrial units suitable for industrial-scale extraction. As a general rule, your building would have to already be very efficient for the small ones to make sense, but if you have large fans running round the clock to extract air from processes, and you are heating the replacement air all the time, it could well be worthwhile getting some quotes.

The other way that heat is lost from your building is through the walls, roof and floor, and of course through the windows and doors even when they are closed and draft-stripped. It’s often easy to tell which parts of a building are losing heat this way, but a good, systematic way of checking is to get an infra-red camera survey done. These are available commercially, but often also through community energy efficiency initiatives. Or you can buy quite good cameras that are either self-contained or connect to a phone.

Which one you choose will depend on your circumstances, but bear in mind that infra-red cameras can also be used around your site for identifying other sources of inefficiency, such as overloaded circuits, poorly lagged piping, dry bearings, and motors and other equipment that you didn’t realise are on all the time. You may need a drone survey for tall buildings, which requires specialist equipment and licensing.

Figure 5.1: Image from a commercial IR building survey

If you are doing it yourself, the best time to do a building survey is when it’s cold outside, and the heating is on in the building. The camera gives you an immediate view of where heat is being lost, which you can then use to plan how to reduce it.

Losses are often significant through glazing, but replacing glazing can be an expensive way of improving the energy efficiency of your building. If you currently have ill-fitting, leaky single-glazed windows with highly conductive steel, or rotting timber frames, then replacing them is likely to be cost-effective, but if your windows are in reasonable condition, you can probably get more impact from your money by focussing elsewhere. Another option in these cases is secondary glazing: leave your existing windows in place, but add another layer (usually internally) to reduce drafts and losses.

Once you have addressed heat losses, the next step is to start putting into the building only as much heat as you need to. There is a huge variety of systems for doing this, and your building should already have something.

The simplest systems can be just a timer on the boiler, which switches it on and off at the same time every day, regardless of building occupancy or weather conditions. More sophisticated systems may add a thermostat on the return water temperature, so that the building is kept at a (more or less) constant temperature. This system will add more heat if the return water comes back cold, so it compensates to some extent for outside conditions.

Next up would be some form of zoning, so that heat can be supplied to different parts of the building, depending on their temperature. A simple way of doing this is using thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs): these are set at the desired temperature, and they regulate the amount of hot water that is diverted to a radiator, depending on the temperature in the room. TRVs are excellent, but they are prone to tampering. A more elaborate approach is to use smart TRVs. These are more expensive, but they are linked to an app which allows you to add much more sophistication to the system, such as setting different programs for different days.

Finally, the best way to control demand is to fit a Building Energy Management System. This can be as elaborate (and expensive) as you like. It would typically include separate sensors for different zones, full programmability, remote access, monitoring, and weather compensation.

For hot water, the same fundamentals apply as with most efficiency projects: only produce what you need, do it as efficiently as possible, conserve it and recover any waste.

Hot water is usually produced by a boiler to fill a storage tank. This approach works well, as the tank can supply energy at a higher rate than the boiler, but for a shorter period (until the hot water runs out). This means that you can use a smaller boiler, but it also means that you lose energy through the walls of the tank, and the connecting pipework. These are easy to insulate (or lag) but it is important to make sure that they are properly insulated, or losses can be significant.

Hot water storage tanks are particularly important for heat pump systems, as the output from heat pumps tends to be much lower than that from a gas boiler. They are designed to run more constantly, providing a steady, but lower level of heat

An alternative to a hot water tank is a combi boiler, which is a compact gas boiler which is powerful enough to provide (some) space heating and hot water. It can heat water fast enough that no storage tank is required.

Your boiler’s efficiency (how much hot water you get to use for each kWh of gas or litre of oil you buy) can vary significantly, depending on how it is set up, and maintained.

One very common mistake that boiler installers make is to set the flow temperature too high. They will often just turn it right up when they commission the boiler, and no-one will ever look at it again. This makes the return temperature higher than necessary, which reduces the efficiency of the boiler.

In condensing boilers, a return temperature above 55°C can prevent the condensing function from working, which further reduces efficiency.

Flue gas analysis uses a probe to detect the concentration of different gases in the exhaust gas from your boiler. The levels and ratios of these gases are indicative of the quality of fuel burning, so can give boiler service engineers valuable insight into how the boiler is performing, and why. Annual analysis of flue gases is recommended.

As discussed in Section 3.5.6.2, heat pumps are a “killer app” in improving the efficiency and emissions of both space heating and hot water. They are best suited for low temperature applications such as these, but specialist heat pumps for higher temperature processes (up to around 200°C are also available).

A great deal of recent development work in heat pump technology has been aimed at making them suitable as a direct drop-in replacement for fossil-based space heating and hot water boilers. This means it is now possible in most cases to simply replace an existing boiler, without implementing any other changes to existing systems.

However, while the measures outlined in this section will improve the efficiency of any heating system, they will increase the efficiency of a heat pump system most of all. This is often presented in the UK press as meaning that you can only have a heat pump once you have improved air-tightness, increased insulation, replaced radiators with underfloor heating, and installed a sophisticated building energy management system, but this is not true.

Replacing your boiler with a heat pump and doing nothing else will reduce your emissions immediately, and may reduce your costs immediately (it will certainly reduce your costs in the long term, as the spark gap reduces). You can then make your installation even more efficient by carrying out these recommended improvements.

In recent years, the efficiency of lighting has improved by 90%, as incandescent bulbs gave way to halogen’s, strip lights, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and finally light emitting diodes (LEDs). LEDs are now so much more efficient that they are one of the most obvious and certain ways of improving the energy efficiency of your operation. In almost every case, unless you already have LEDs, it is worth replacing whatever is currently installed.

[8]

Figure 5.2: Historical increase in efficiency of lighting technologies. (Source: NASA)

The first step should be to carry out a lighting survey. Very often, lighting efficiency projects are done on a like-for-like replacement basis, but this misses an opportunity to establish what levels of lighting are actually required in different parts of your premises. Surprisingly, specialist lighting surveyors will often point out that current lighting levels are too low. This means that replacing current lights with LEDs will not only result in a saving in running costs, but also an increase in productivity, safety, wellbeing and appreciation from staff.

As part of the lighting survey, consider also when lights are required. Automating lighting systems can result in significant savings. Lighting circuits can be controlled by timers, ambient light sensors, presence sensors, or a combination.

Mains electricity across Europe is nominally supplied at 230 V, but there is an allowable voltage range of -6% to +10%, so your supply can range from 216.2 V to 253 V. As every customer must get at least 216.2 V, suppliers manage the voltage so that the customer on the end of the line always gets at least this voltage. This means that customers connecting at any point closer to the transmission transformer will get a higher voltage.

A higher voltage than you need wastes energy and money, and reduces the lifespan of equipment.

Voltage optimisation equipment sits between the mains supply and your entire facility (or specific items of equipment with a high electrical load). Whatever the incoming voltage, the voltage supplied by the equipment is optimised (e.g. to 220 V). Typically, this will save at least 5% of electricity costs, with an ROI of about two years.

Another issue with electricity supply is related to your own equipment, rather than the grid. Power factor is notoriously difficult to explain. For a full description, have a look at the Wikipedia entry on AC power [9], but in brief summary, it is the difference between how much electricity you pay for, and how much useful work you get out of it. The two are not the same, and the difference depends on what you are using electricity for, and how it is controlled.

Many electricity bills include a figure for Power Factor, or a specific charge for Reactive Power (see Section 3.5.7.5). Power Factor is measured as a figure between 0 and 1. 1 means that you are using everything you are paying for; 0.5 means you are only getting useful work out of half of what is going through your meter. Using these figures, you can easily derive an estimate of how much power (and money) you are wasting this way.

Power Factor Correction (PFC) equipment is like voltage control in that it sits between your mains supply and your facility. PFC uses capacitor banks to improve your Power Factor, usually to near enough 1.0. The cost of the equipment varies, but if your electricity costs are significant, and you can see from your bills that your Power Factor is low, it is worth getting in touch with suppliers for a quote.

Process efficiency is covered in Section 7.3. This section covers energy efficient technologies specifically related to common industrial processes.

Nearly 70% of industrial electrical energy goes into powering electric motors which drive pumps, fans, compressors, conveyors and everything else that depends on rotation to get the job done. High efficiency motors can be up to twice as efficient as cheap motors. Although they are more expensive, the savings can add up to make investing in more efficient motors cost-effective.

Motors sold in the EU have a rating from IE1 to IE5, with 5 being the highest efficiency. These regulations no longer apply in the UK, but UK the equivalent UK regulations have not diverged much yet. By looking at how much electricity is used in motors throughout your processes and facilities, and factoring in the efficiency rating of existing and available replacement motors, it is reasonably straightforward to design a programme of replacement which will result in cost and electricity savings.

Motors are designed to rotate at a single speed which is a function of grid electricity frequency. This is fine for applications where motors are only required to run at one speed, but wherever this is not the case, some other means must be employed to control rotation speed. This might be a gearbox, belt drive, or just switching the motor on and off as required. All of these approaches result in efficiency losses.

Variable speed drives (VSDs) are an efficient solution to this problem (typically returning efficiencies of 92% to 98%). They are not “drives” in the sense of being themselves motors, which is often confusing. They are more closely related to the Power Quality conditioning equipment described in Section 5.5. A typical VSD takes mains electricity, converts it to direct current (DC), then feeds this DC current to an inverter, which creates another AC supply where the voltage and frequency can be modulated. This allows a motor connected to the output from the drive to be run at any speed with a system efficiency that is better than alternatives.

The greenhouse gas emissions caused by using a kWh of electricity in the UK have reduced from 705 gCO2e in 1990 to 238 g CO2e in 2023, a reduction of almost two-thirds.

Figure 5.3: Carbon intensity of UK electricity (kgCO2e per kWh). Source: Our World in Data [10].

This has been achieved by reducing (and now eliminating) coal-fired electricity generation, and by deploying renewable energy generation, which has no (or very low) greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure 5.4: Electricity production by source, United Kingdom. Source: Our World in Data [11].

Decarbonising electricity generation in the UK is perhaps the single greatest achievement in shifting the global economy to a model which need not make the planet uninhabitable. There are plenty of other critical achievements which we have yet to realise, but this proves that a major global industrial economy can take steps to become more sustainable, and do so fast enough to make a difference.

Figure 5.5 shows how this is possible: it shows the full life-cycle emissions associated with generating a kWh of electricity by different means. At a glance, it is clear that shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy generation makes a huge difference.

Figure 5.5: GHG emissions from different electricity generation technologies. Source: IPCC AR6.

This achievement means that the electricity-related emissions of every UK business have reduced by two-thirds since 1990 (all else being equal) without them having to do anything different (other than support and subsidise the grid decarbonisation project).

The following sections show how businesses can decarbonise their electricity supply even faster.

In most cases, switching to a green tariff does not cause a reduction in emissions.

This is illustrated in this article in Nature Climate Change [12] (which even made it onto the BBC [13]). The paper analyses 115 Science Based Targets Initiative [14] submissions where companies used Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to reduce declared emissions associated with their electricity consumption (which is what most green tariffs do). The authors recalculated these emissions in line with reality, rather than accounting methodology, concluding that most of these companies actually miss the decarbonisation targets they claim to have hit because the claimed emissions reductions associated with their green tariffs are not real.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol[15] recognises two calculation methodologies for estimating emissions from the use of electricity: location-based and market-based. The location-based methodology assumes that the emissions caused by any business getting a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity from the grid at a particular moment are the same. This makes sense (more or less), as the electricity fed into the grid at any moment will have a carbon intensity based on the mix of power stations in use at that moment (long-distance transmission constraints notwithstanding). The market-based methodology considers things differently: if your electricity supplier buys wholesale renewable energy and sells it on to your business, you can say that your electricity consumption has zero emissions.

The problem with this approach is that suppliers need only balance supply and demand over a year, and the certificates which prove that the electricity they buy is green (Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin, or REGOs) can be sold separately from the electricity itself (referred to as “unbundled”). This means there is nothing to stop an electricity supplier from buying whatever electricity is available, then adding up how many REGOs they need at the end of the year to make it seem green (on paper). Their customers will carry on their business activities on calm nights when the grid is supplied mainly by gas-fired power stations, and their supplier will buy REGOs generated when the wind was blowing and the sun was shining to make them feel good about it.

Put more simply, using this method, a manufacturing facility which operates 24/7 all year round can operate using 100% solar electricity.

Of course, this is nonsense, and it doesn’t drive decarbonisation. In fact, there is concern that being on a green tariff leads consumers to use more electricity, as they believe it has no climate impact. As it has exactly the same impact as any other tariff, green tariffs may actually contribute to higher emissions.

To estimate emissions from electricity use accurately enough to really understand them, and to take action to reduce them, consumers need to know the emissions that are associated with the electricity they actually use, when and where they use it. Currently in the UK, there are very few green electricity tariffs which supply this information. If you are already on a green tariff, ask your supplier if they can provide you with time-matched generation information. If they cannot, a quick search for “time-matched green electricity tariff” will turn up a couple of alternative suppliers.

One sure way to reduce the amount of energy you buy is to generate it yourself. This can be an excellent idea, but there are a few important considerations, which are covered in the sections below.

For all on-site generation technologies, there are also some common considerations. These can be summarised as:

It is rare that a business can generate more energy than it uses. More usually, on site renewable energy generation will take the edge off peak demand. It is also worth bearing in mind that when renewable energy generation is high, grid electricity may be available at very low cost (depending on your tariff), as local utility-scale renewable generation will be high at the same time.

If you want to generate electricity on site, and there is any chance that you will generate more than you consume at any time, you will need an export connection agreement. You have to apply for this from your local Distribution Network Operator (DNO). In the UK, you can find out who this is here: Who’s my electricity network operator? – Energy Networks Association (ENA).

Bear in mind that your local electricity grid may not be able to support any more generation capacity, and whether it can or not, a grid application will have a cost and may take several months to come through. A call to the local DNO can be a good place to start.

Putting solar photovoltaic panels on your building can be a great idea, reducing the amount you spend on electricity by generating it on site. But there are a few things to look out for.

The first is building ownership. If you own your building, you will still need Planning approval, but if you don’t, you will also need the approval of the owner. Secondly, you will need a large enough roof area to make the exercise worthwhile. A good resource for estimating how much you can generate (and when) is the Global Solar Atlas, and you can measure the size of your roof using Google Earth. You can put the location of your facility into the Atlas, then specify the scale and orientation of the available roof, and it will output a detailed generation estimate, all for free.

The orientation and pitch of your roof are important, but not critical. Due South is best, but you may find that East and West are still perfectly viable, particularly depending on when you need the power.

If you use hot water, solar PV can integrate well with a heat pump and thermal storage, as you can generate hot water whenever the sun shines, store it cheaply and efficiently, then use it when you need it.

If all you need is hot water, solar thermal can also be a useful approach. Solar thermal panels are simple, using the heat of the sun to warm a fluid (usually glycol) which then heats water in a tank. Historically, solar thermal panels were so much more efficient than solar PV that they made a lot of sense, particularly if hot water is all you need, but more recently, the rise in efficiency and fall in cost of solar PV means that this advantage has been eroded. When you add in the efficiency of heat pumps in providing hot water (which will typically be around 300%), and the flexibility of generating electricity rather than hot water, it is now usually better to install solar PV instead.

One obvious problem with generating renewable electricity is that you can’t always generate everything you need when you need it. Batteries have recently become cheap enough to become a viable solution. This is particularly the case for solar generation, as the battery can be used on a (more or less) daily basis, which helps to justify the cost of installation. They are not so great for wind generation, which tends to be on for weeks at a time, then off for days. This means that a battery of an affordable size is only used rarely. The situation is similar for hydro generation, although it is also more common in this case to have some form of physical reservoir, which can be used to store energy until it is needed.

Batteries also allow the use of time-of-use tariffs. These now come in various forms, including those that offer a lower rate at certain times of day, to those where the price of electricity is tied directly to wholesale prices. In combination with a battery, these tariffs allow businesses to purchase electricity when it is cheap (and/or low carbon; they tend to be the same times), and use it when they need it.

There is no need for any onsite generation when using batteries, but this approach is also highly compatible with on-site generation. For example, a solar PV installation in combination with a battery and time-of-use tariff allows a business to charge the battery either when the solar is generating or when the cost is low (which tends to be overnight), and then use the electricity whenever it is required.

It is very rare that a business has the right conditions for effective on-site wind generation. Wind turbines not only require very good wind conditions (which can be assessed on the Global Wind Atlas [16]), they are also subject to stringent requirements regarding topple distance, noise, shadow flicker, visual impact, radar, historic monuments, listed buildings, aviation, radar, communications, habitat designations and so on.

Wind turbines are complex machines which have to operate in harsh conditions. They require regular, skilled servicing to ensure that they operate reliably. The cost of this servicing sets an effective minimum viable turbine size, as it has to be absorbed in the financial model. In practice, this means that for most sites, only large scale turbines (e.g, 1 MW capacity and above) are likely to be viable, and then only provided the business has enough electricity demand to make use of the generated power on site.

Very small turbines (e.g. building mounted, vertical axis etc.) are not a practical means of generating electricity on site.

It is very rare indeed that a business will be able to generate its own electricity using hydroelectric generation. It is also every bit as difficult as wind to get the required permitting, and potential environmental impacts can be significant. However, for those businesses which do have access to hydro resources, the benefits are considerable. Although hydro is becoming less reliable as the climate becomes less reliable, as a source of electricity, hydro is still relatively dependable. It also has the advantage that output can be modulated, so that it matches demand, and does not rely on being able to export to the grid.

Biomass has long been touted as a renewable energy source, and even attracts significant subsidies. However, this claim is made on the basis that the fuel is zero carbon, which it is not. If you burn timber, it releases about the same amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as coal. The zero carbon claim comes from the assertion that any carbon dioxide emitted is drawn back out of the atmosphere as the timber (or other biomass) re-grows. For fast growing biomass, like short-rotation coppicing, elephant grass etc., this is not too far from the truth: the same amount of carbon dioxide will be drawn down pretty quickly, often within a year. But for timber, the process takes decades. This means that you are emitting carbon dioxide now, causing immediate damage to the climate system, then gradually drawing it back down again, slowly reducing the impact, then doing it again.

Using biomass in this way also has significant negative impacts on biodiversity and air quality.

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is a technology that was developed to make better use of the energy generated in burning gas. As discussed in Section 3.2, using gas to generate electricity results in over half the available energy being wasted as heat. CHP aims to use this waste heat as well, so a CHP engine is part generation technology and part boiler.

Compared to a boiler, this approach is more efficient, although care must be taken to optimise the system design to ensure that it can deliver enough electricity and heat, as each is required. CHP has now been largely superseded by developments in heat pump technology, and by the decarbonisation of grid electricity. Any application which would have been served by CHP can now be served better by a heat pump, and at a much lower climate impact.

District heating can be run by renewable energy, although in the UK this is still rare. It is discussed in Section 3.4.

In the UK, if you want to install on-site renewable energy generation of any sort, and you want to connect it to the grid, it needs to be designed and installed by a company that is registered with the Microgeneration Certification Scheme.

Businesses with high energy consumption (e.g. above 10 GWh (10,000,000 kWh) per year can enter into a Power Purchase Agreement direct with a generator (such as a wind or solar farm).

This has the advantage of controlling (and significantly reducing) the unit cost of the electricity you buy, but in terms of climate impact, the matching of generation to demand is not perfect: the wind or solar farm will generate when it generates, and you will use electricity when you need it. The electricity you actually use is supplied from the grid and the emissions associated with it depend on the grid fuel mix when you use it.

A similar approach for lower energy users was pioneered by UK company Ripple Energy.

This section covers moving people and things around, by whatever means and for whatever reason. This includes commuting to work (or working from home), travelling for work, the delivery of everything you need to carry out your business (ingredients, equipment, contractors etc.) and the means by which you distribute your products to your customers, and how you move any waste materials you generate to wherever they are recycled.

For all forms of travel and transport, there is a basic common hierarchy. Not all options are available in all cases, but the fundamentals apply across the board: to perform the same function, different transport modes always have a different scale of climate impact.

Figure 6.1: Travel hierarchy (Source: Energy Saving Trust [17])

The first, and best option is not to travel at all. During the pandemic, working from home and online meetings became the norm, and emissions from commuting and travel for business disappeared. Since then, there has been pressure to return to the office, and encouragement for face-to-face meetings, and those emissions have crept back up. There are certainly advantages to being in the office, and to meeting face-to-face, but very little research has been done to establish whether these advantages outweigh the costs, and the disadvantages.

Next, if you have to travel in person, the best option is walking (or wheeling if walking is not an option for you). Walking has effectively zero impact on the climate.

A close second to walking in terms of impact, cycling is slightly worse because of the emissions involved in manufacturing the equipment you need. On the other hand, cycling obviously has significant advantages in terms of the speed and distance you can travel.

Active travel has been shown to have significant health benefits. Although there is a perception that cycling particularly is dangerous and exposes you to air pollution, these risk factors are more than outweighed by the health benefits of the exercise involved. If the whole of the UK was as enthusiastic about active travel as the currently most active areas, it would prevent an estimated 1,200 early deaths every year [18].

For longer distances (or less agreeable weather), public transport almost always has a lower impact than using any individual vehicle.

Electric vehicles have developed to the point where their total cost of ownership is now lower than conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Their range has increased, and charging infrastructure is rarely an issue. They have no direct emissions, so make no contribution to local air pollution. They do have a climate impact from generation of the electricity needed to charge them, but this is far lower than that of an ICE vehicle even in countries where electricity generation has high emissions, and as grids decarbonise, this impact reduces further.

The development of electric vehicles is a huge threat to the fossil fuel industry, which has funded a campaign of disinformation to undermine their deployment, and a lobbying campaign to weaken legislation to support them, and to phase out ICE vehicles [19]. Don’t fall for it: active travel and public transport are still (generally) better, but if you have to travel in an individual vehicle, electric vehicles are transformative.

Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles are any vehicles that burn fuel to get the energy they need to move. Compared to electric vehicles, they are terribly inefficient [20], and they cause local air pollution which has serious health impacts, as well as being one of the main contributors to climate breakdown.

In some cases, ICE vehicles can still be the only option, for example where load carrying, extended range and off-road capability are all required together, but these cases are dwindling. Have a look online to see what EV models are now available that might be able to do the job.

If you have any choice, you should not use ICE vehicles.

Driver Efficiency Training is one of the most cost-effective interventions available to any business which has significant transport emissions. Both emissions and costs can be removed by up to 15% for very low investment. Drivers can then be incentivised to implement the lessons they have learned through monitoring and competition. A prize (or even just a leaderboard) for most efficient driver of the month has been shown to be a highly effective way of reducing fuel costs and emissions.

The next step up from driver training is to install telematics in fleet vehicles. This is particularly useful where vehicles may be used by different drivers, as it helps to automate the monitoring of fuel efficiency, and this automated analysis can be segmented by vehicle and by driver, helping to identify issues which can be addressed to maintain and improve efficiency.

Finally, flying. Flying is often held up as the worst thing you can possibly do if you care about the future of our planet, and with good reason. It is the most carbon-intensive method of travel. If there is any alternative, whether that means taking longer to travel by train, or not travelling at all, you should do everything you can to do that instead.

It is also a fabulous way of visiting other places, meeting other people and gaining an understanding of other cultures which is arguably also essential to planetary survival. Rather than arguing that you should not fly, it is better to consider carefully why, and how often you fly.

If you have to fly, it is better to travel Economy, rather than Business or First Class (because the emissions from the plane are the same, but they are shared among more people). If you can, travel for longer and get more done while you are there: that way, the emissions may be the same, but the benefit will be greater. And whatever you are doing that you need to fly for, try to make sure that you push the sustainability agenda while you are there.

The emissions caused by your employees commuting to and from work also form part of your company’s carbon footprint. A company which allows remote or flexible working, or which has offices in city centres that are well served by public transport, will have lower commuting emissions than a similar company with an out-of-town office that can only be accessed by car, and an inflexible requirement for employees to work onsite.

The travel hierarchy is the same for commuting as it is for business travel.

To estimate emissions from commuting, you will likely need to conduct a survey of employee commuting habits. Depending on the size of your business, this can be a considerable undertaking, but it reveals useful insights into what steps can be taken to reduce these emissions. A selection of the most common interventions is given below:

Analysis of commuting survey data can reveal patterns in commuting and residence which allow companies to organise group travel opportunities. These include ride share, where a simple scheme encourages employees who live near each other to co-ordinate commuting by car (this is often encouraged by incentives such as a competition, with prizes awarded to the most efficient travellers), and formal Company Transport arrangements, where transport is provided by the company (e.g. a minibus which collects workers and takes them to site).

In the United Kingdom, the Government-backed Bike2Work [21] scheme provides subsidised bicycles (and associated cycling equipment) through a salary sacrifice scheme which significantly reduces the cost. This is intended to encourage active travel to work.

Also in the UK, many private companies now offer a similar arrangement for the purchase of electric vehicles, taking advantage of the salary sacrifice arrangements to reduce the cost of owning an electric vehicle.

Whether or not home working reduces greenhouse gas emissions is more complicated that it might first appear. Most offices do not have the ability to flex their heating and cooling systems to match occupancy, so a half-full office has the same emissions as a completely full one. Similarly, a third of residences have another occupant who is home all day; in these cases, the additional heating and electricity load from a home worker is likely to be small, but in the other two-thirds of cases, the property only needs to be heated because someone is working from home.

This means that, in most cases, home working doubles up, at least on heating loads. The only way to be sure of how this works in your own case is through detailed monitoring, which is difficult to do, and quite intrusive. Most residential properties in the UK are heated with gas, and the additional greenhouse gas emissions associated with additional heating load represent around 90% of the total. It is possible to reduce the emissions from additional electricity consumption through arrangement of a company-sponsored green tariff (see Section 5.7.1), but even a good quality green tariff will have only a modest impact on total working-from-home emissions (unless employees use a heat pump to heat their home).

Emissions from commuting, on the other hand, can be clearly shown to reduce significantly when employees work from home, as they do not commute so these emissions drop to zero.

This section attempts to cover opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from business operations. Obviously, there is a huge range and variety of business types, and it would be impossible to cover them all in detail. However, there are themes that are common to most businesses, and common opportunities to manage them to reduce climate impact.

One overlooked, cheap and highly effective approach to reducing emissions is staff training. Nobody knows your business better than your own colleagues; help them to understand your climate impact and how to reduce it, demonstrate your commitment to doing so and empower them to act, and you will have a more motivated workforce and a wealth of decarbonisation opportunities. This approach is contagious: making employees aware of climate and other environmental issues affects how they behave at home, as well as at work. The same applies to customers and suppliers too.

The Carbon Literacy Project [22] is a good place start.

On average, the goods and services that are used in your business are responsible for about a third of all emissions: only slightly less than all the emissions from direct combustion of fossil fuels and use of electricity combined. These supply chain emissions are hard to manage, as they are not directly under your control, but there are some steps you can take that are effective.

A carbon footprint (see Section 9.1) is a useful way of getting an initial impression of the emissions of your supply chain. Carbon footprinting uses generic emissions intensity factors (EIFs), which tell you the emissions associated with buying a certain amount, or a certain value, of different goods and services. Because these EIFs are generic, they can only tell you the difference between categories, not between products, or between supplier companies. But they do give you an idea of the relative importance of the emissions from supplied goods and services, compared to other emissions categories such as energy. They can also show how emissions are distributed across your supplied goods and services, which allows you to focus efforts to reduce emissions, and to improve the accuracy of the emissions estimate.

The first step is to ask your suppliers for the carbon intensity of their upstream operations. Note that this is different from their carbon footprint. A carbon footprint includes downstream emissions, and is expressed as a single figure (e.g. 3,456 kg CO2e for the last financial year, although be sceptical if that is the figure, as it has clearly been made up: this happens).

The upstream carbon intensity (UCI) only includes (as the name suggests) your supplier’s upstream emissions, which is all that concerns you for the calculation of your own supply chain emissions. The intensity comes from dividing it by revenue for the same period used to calculate those emissions. This period doesn’t matter that much. Frankly, you will be lucky to get this detailed information out of any of your suppliers. If you have the choice, the most recent quarter is best: this has the advantage of being fresh (so the supplier looks good if they are reducing their emissions) while covering a long enough period to iron out most variations. Annual is fine, particularly if you are dealing with a supplier that is likely to have significant seasonal variation (such as a farmer).

Upstream carbon intensity is expressed as kgCO2e per £ (or other currencies outside the UK).

The reason you want this figure is because you can use it to generate the emissions associated with your spend with that supplier, by simply multiplying your spend by the figure. The logic goes like this: if you spend £10,000 with a business whose annual revenue is £1,000,000, you have contributed 1% of their annual revenue. If their annual greenhouse gas emissions for the last year were 1,000 tonnes CO2e (which is 1,000,000 kg CO2e) then their upstream carbon intensity is 1 kgCO2e per £. You have spent £10,000 with them, so your supply chain emissions go up by 10 tonnes (10,000 kg).

Simply asking this question of your suppliers is highly educational. Mostly you will be ignored; sometimes you will be told that they don’t know what you are talking about; occasionally you will be given what you have asked for. The way the question is answered tells you a great deal about how serious each supplier is about addressing climate breakdown. The ones that engage are the ones you want to keep doing business with.

Once you start getting some UCI figures from your suppliers, you can use them to improve the accuracy of your carbon footprint. This is helpful anyway, but the real power of this approach comes from tracking improvements in supplier UCI and comparing alternative suppliers. If you can get the same service at the same price, with a significant reduction in emissions, why wouldn’t you? If some suppliers are committed to reducing their emissions, while others are not (or do not even engage with the question), why would you not favour those that are going to make your life easier?

Shifting to lower carbon suppliers is the key principle of managing supply chain emissions, but the educational process of simply asking is equally valuable. In survey after survey, businesses report an increase in the frequency of requests for this information. Even if they are not particularly motivated to reduce their own climate impact, the work involved in responding to customer information requests is motivation enough to calculate a carbon footprint, just so that they can answer the question.

If you explain to your suppliers why you are doing this, they may well ignore you. In most cases, the business from a single customer is not enough to catalyse change in a supplier. But as more of their customers ask, it becomes a trend, and that becomes a matter of survival for their business.

Many of your suppliers will not understand what you are talking about, or how to go about calculating their carbon footprint (which they will need to supply you with the UCI figure you need). There are many ways of going about it, but they could do worse than using a simple but effective carbon management tool, like Sage Earth Carbon Accounting [23]

If you are going to manage your climate impact, you need to measure it accurately. This means shifting from generic sectoral emissions factors to those specifically relating to your own suppliers (and this applies to all aspects of your carbon footprint, not just supply chain).

If a supplier consistently refuses to engage, you will not be able to manage your climate impact while they are still your supplier. This is a message which needs to be communicated clearly to them. Again, most suppliers will simply shrug this off, as few customers are so important that they wield enough influence alone, but as more customers threaten to leave, or actually do take their business elsewhere, suppliers have no choice but to comply.

All of the above steps are aimed at the difficult problem of reducing emissions from existing supply chains, but it is much easier to deal with supply chain emissions in advance. When issuing tenders for the procurement of goods and services, you can add any stipulations you like. A good source of ready-made procurement clauses can be found at the Chancery Lane Project [24].

Once introduced into a tender, and the associated proposal and contract, these clauses become a legal requirement for delivery of the goods or services.

Consistently one of the most effective ways of reducing climate impacts is to operate your process more efficiently. As “more efficiently” only means doing the same with less, this approach reduces not only climate impact, but also costs, waste, time and so on. It is remarkable how many businesses try to fix an ailing business model by working the same way, but harder. This just loses more money and has more environmental impact, and it’s exhausting. The trick is to work smarter, not harder; and to do that, you need to know what you are doing now, so you can identify how to do it better.

Table 7.1 is a generic process mapping template. It can be adapted to most processes (and this includes not just making widgets in factories, but also services like consultancy or cutting hair). Extend it to as many steps as you need, then add an estimate of material, time, energy and water inputs (and product inputs from previous stages), and outputs of waste, heat and effluent (and products going into the next step).

Table 7.1: Process mapping template

This allows you to start modelling your process step-by-step. Take the number or weight of finished product as a denominator and notice how value is added at each step. Any waste product from later steps carries a far greater burden of lost process costs than similar waste from earlier steps.

Some processes have direct emissions of greenhouse gases which come from the process itself, rather than the generation of energy to drive the process. These processes are rare, particularly among small businesses. The only typical example is emissions of carbon dioxide from yeast used in the process of brewing (and distilling). Usually these emissions are relatively small, and hard to reduce, but it can still be cost-effective to abate them, because of the high cost of carbon dioxide which is used in later steps in the bottling process, or as a value-added product for existing customers in the hospitality sector. These emissions are a fundamental part of the yeast metabolism process, so the only way to reduce the emission to atmosphere is to capture the carbon dioxide before it escapes. This can be done cost-effectively using equipment which captures, cleans and compresses the gas, which can then be used or sold. In terms of emissions to atmosphere, this has no effect, as the gas will eventually be released.

There are various other chemical processes which release carbon dioxide as part of the basic chemistry involved, but these are rarely undertaken by small businesses, and any business that does carry out these processes will be aware of these issues and how to deal with them, so they are not covered here.

Another source of greenhouse gas emissions which can be surprisingly important is fugitive emissions. These typically come from refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pump (RACHP) systems, and are usually not carbon dioxide, but other greenhouse gases.

Figure 7.1: UK F-gas emissions in 2020, split by main sectors (% of 12.2 MtCO2e total) [25]

Figure 7.1 shows the split of fugitive emissions from F-gases in the UK. While most come from RACHP, there is still a significant impact from medical inhalers (MDIs). Although the amount of F-gas involved in this use is tiny, the high GWP increases the impact.

Section 2.1.4 discusses all the greenhouse gases, and their global warming potential (GWP). Although there have been significant improvements in the past few years, refrigerant gases still typically have a high GWP, so small leaks can have a large impact. Older systems in particular may use high-GWP gases, and be more prone to leaks. Although these leaks are not noticeable, they can add up to be your biggest single climate impact.

Wherever you use refrigerant gases, that equipment should be serviced regularly by qualified technicians. As a standard part of the service, they will check the pressure, and top up the refrigerant gas if required. The amount and type of gas they use to top up will be recorded on the servicing report, and this tells you how much, and what type of gas leaked out of the system since the last service.

How you deal with this depends on the age and nature of your system, and your servicing technician should be able to advise. Potential solutions include swapping out the gas for a lower-GWP alternative, conducting an ultrasonic leak detection survey, or replacing the entire system with a lower impact and more efficient alternative.

The climate impact of water use is usually small, unless you use an awful lot of it. In the UK, the activities associated with delivering a tonne (m3) of water causes emissions of 0.19 kg CO2e, and treatment of the associated effluent 0.17, giving a total of 0.36 kgCO2e/m3. So in the UK half a tonne of water has a climate impact equivalent to using a kWh of electricity.

If a tap is left running at 10 litres per minute, it results in emissions of 0.216 kgCO2e per hour, equivalent to leaving the lights on in a small office.

Often the best way of managing water is the simplest: conduct a regular survey to ensure that taps are not left on. Look at opportunities for switching to low-flow heads for process water, and look into automation where it might help reduce consumption.

As water is so much cheaper than electricity, it is usually only metered with relatively crude analogue meters which have to be read manually. However, smart water meters are available, which can be fitted in-line with your pipework, or mounted externally, so that no plumbing work is required. These non-intrusive meters tend to be more expensive and less accurate than the in-line variety.

Depending on your process, effluent metering tends to be more difficult, for example requiring a v-notch and ultrasonic level meter. Effluent charging is often calculated on a “deemed” basis, where it is assumed that the same volume of water leaves your facility as enters it, so you are charged for effluent on the basis of metered water supplied (minus a fixed allowance for “domestic use” on site). The advantage of having a separate effluent meter is that you can check that this assumption is reasonable, and also identify any leaks within your facility, that you will be paying for both in fresh water supply, and effluent charges.

Effluent treatment is charged using the Mogden formula (or a variant of it, depending on your local water company). This formula calculates how much you are charged for your effluent treatment service, based on:

This formula means that your business pays more, the more effluent you discharge, and the stronger it is in terms of biodegradable material, and solids. This gives a few main opportunities to reduce this cost:

1. Reduce effluent flow. This can be achieved through simple behavioural, procedural and training interventions, such as:

A: Training staff on the cost of water and effluent,

B: Developing standard operating procedures for equipment which uses water,

C: Replacing manual taps with automatically closing taps,

D: Replacing high flow outlets with low-flow spray nozzles,

E: Using high pressure, low volume (HPLV) jet wash sprayers, rather than hoses,

2. Reduce strength and solids load of effluent, e.g.:

A: Sweep up rather than hosing down,

B: Wipe out vessels and pig out pipework before cleaning with water,

3. Once all the above have been done, look into the feasibility of on-site effluent treatment equipment. This will not affect the flow, but it can reduce the solids and biological load, so reducing total effluent charges.

Additionally, your effluent discharge licence may include limits on parameters that are specific to your particular process, such as metals, ammonia etc. There is not usually a charge for exceed these limits, so much as a fine, which may be followed by enforcement proceedings which will require the business to get the situation under control.

Waste represents process inefficiency: it is material that you have paid for, and which you have to pay for, which does not form part of the product you sell. The cost, climate and other environmental impacts of producing and processing this material result in no benefit to your company. Businesses often measure the cost of waste disposal, and consider this to be the cost of waste, but this misses the majority of waste costs, which are the embedded costs of the processes (including the associated time, energy, water etc.) that went into creating something that you then have to pay someone to deal with.

This main cost of waste, and how to address is, is discussed in Section 7.3. The following sections deal with how to manage any remaining waste that is produced.

The linear, extractive model which the mainstream economy is based on, and which most of us have grown up with, means that the attitude most people have to waste is irrational: waste is described as trash or garbage, and is “thrown away,” rather than being thought of as useful material which can be reprocessed and re-used. This often results in waste material being handled carelessly, resulting in mixing and contamination which turns useful (and often valuable) material into something that genuinely does have no economic value, as it costs more to clean or separate than the value of the material. Careful segregation and storage of waste streams is essential to preserve their value, so that they can be reprocessed and used again. It also retains the most value in the material, so that it can be recycled effectively, reducing costs and in some cases even retaining a positive value from the material.

All materials have an “embodied impact:” the climate and other environmental impacts associated with their own raw materials and manufacturing processes. The embodied impact of making anything from virgin raw materials is invariably greater than the impact of using recycled materials. But to make things from recycled materials, businesses need a reliable source of these materials. This means that the businesses which create these waste materials need to ensure that they are correctly segregated, and uncontaminated. It is usually possible to secure higher prices for good quality segregated waste materials.

Depending on how much cash you have in the bank, one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce your climate impact can be simply to change your bank. When you keep your money in a bank, it doesn’t just sit there waiting until you need it. Most of the money held by banks is invested, and where it is invested makes a huge difference: about 7.5x from the best to the worst, ranging (in June 2025) from 317 kgCO2e per year for each £10,000 held (Triodos) to 2,376 kg for the worst (Barclays)[26]. This is because greener banks have policies in place which prevent them from investing in anything (e.g. coal mining, oil exploration, livestock farming) which has a seriously detrimental effect on the climate (and often other environmental and social impacts too).

Simply switching your banking service to one of the greener banks will reduce your impact, and in the UK, this can be done very simply, with automated systems in place to transfer all standing orders etc., so that automated payments continue from your new bank.

Analysis of the carbon footprints of businesses across the global economy [27] shows that the proportion of emissions from each Scope of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol is as follows:

Table 8.1: Proportion of emissions by Scope reported to CDP, 2023.

This analysis should be taken with caution, as it depends on the complete and accurate calculation of footprints by companies submitting to CDP, however it is based on the best data available. Of course, it is also a huge generalisation and it can’t apply specifically to your own situation, but it does show that, if you want to reduce your climate impact, then just looking upstream, at your own material and energy use, is not enough. We also need to look at the design of your products (and, although to a lesser extent, services).

There are some useful resources about Green Design on the UK Design Council website [28], but these are specifically about what it is, and how important it is, rather than how to do it (although the context and examples do give some useful guidance). If you have the resources, employing a specialist design consultant to help with this can be a good way of going about it, but this is certainly not necessary: few people will be as familiar as you with your product, what it does, and how it’s made. Identifying ways to reduce its climate impact just takes a bit of thought.

Bear in mind here that the green design process blurs the lines between upstream and downstream that are established in carbon footprinting by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. The object of the exercise here is to minimise the life cycle emissions of your product, but many of those emissions may be included in your (upstream) supplied goods and services. For example, if your product uses a lot of steel, but you can replace this with engineered timber, it will reduce the life-cycle emissions of your product, but this will already be picked up in your carbon footprint as a reduction in the emissions from supplied goods and services.

Green product design is a wide ranging and complex discipline. The following sections offer some advice that is helpful in most cases, but covering all possible eventualities is beyond the scope of this resource.

Emissions come from every stage of a product’s life cycle, so to get a handle on how important each stage is, the first step is to model a typical use cycle. This varies enormously even for a single product, so it is necessary to make some assumptions. Far better if these are based on customer research, but if that is not possible, it is likely that you know how your products are used pretty well.

Your estimate of emissions will be highly dependent on the assumptions you make, and where you define the boundary of your model. This cannot be helped; the best you can do is to state clearly what decisions you have made, and why, and try to be as honest as possible.

Some examples are given below. For each example, general boundary considerations are in brackets, and options for consideration are included in italics.

Table 8.2: Examples of product service life boundaries.

Once you have done basic modelling on lifetime emissions, you will have a foundation for developing a design statement. This is an important step in the green design process, which should not be skipped. Design involves a complex interaction of compromises, each of which impacts on previous decisions. Without a clear statement to refer back to, the design process will wander and end up in a very different place to where you set out for. The design statement gives you a touchstone to refer back to at every decision stage, which helps to keep the whole process on track.

In this context, the design statement will probably be something along the lines of “minimise life cycle emissions,” but even this simple goal can lead on to other considerations, such as transitioning to product-as-a-service, circular economy and other impacts (e.g. plastics).

Often a good way to reduce the life-cycle emissions of products is to substitute materials. This can result in a reduction in upstream emissions from manufacturing the materials that you use, and a reduction in the emissions associated with dealing with the product at the end of its life.

Figure 8.1 gives some examples of the embodied carbon of some commonly used materials, with figures for both virgin (new) and recycled materials. This shows the large difference in emissions associated with different materials, as well as the significant reduction in emissions from using recycled materials.

Figure 8.1: Embodied carbon of selected materials. Source: DESNZ 2024.

It should be noted that this refers only to climate impact. Some materials (notably plastics) have other significant environmental impacts which should also be taken into account.

The environmental impact of products is greatly reduced if they can be repaired, rather than being “thrown away” and replaced. This increases their service life, extending the time before the environmental impact of replacing them has to be incurred.

Even if they cannot be repaired, designing products so that they can be economically disassembled means that component parts can be separated and recycled as clean, segregated materials, increasing their value, and the likelihood that they will be reused.

Composite materials are problematic in this context. This includes different types of material that have been glued or bonded together. Separately, it may be economically viable to recycle these materials, but if they cannot be separated then they cannot be recycled, the material is lost, and further environmental impact is incurred by manufacturing new materials.

Similarly, security screws and similar fixings which cannot be removed, make it impossible for products to be disassembled, either for repair, or for recycling at the end of their service life.

Another useful approach to improving the repairability of products is to design in modularity. This is the approach taken by products such as Fairphone [29], which is designed so that most of the main components can be replaced.

For many products, the main climate impact comes from emissions in use. This is the case for many products which run on electricity, and even more so for those that run on other energy sources. The life cycle assessment model will give you an idea of the product’s use cycle, and resources such as the UK Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors can be used to calculate typical emissions in use. How you go about reducing these emissions is very much dependent on the product in question, but typically, electrification provides an easy win, with more incremental reductions following from energy efficiency improvements, and of course from the decarbonisation of electricity generation.

When your product is finally at the end of its useful life, what happens to it? If it cannot be economically recycled, then it will continue to contribute to global environmental impacts as it is either buried in landfill or incinerated. As well as the immediate impacts of waste disposal, there will also be greater impacts from creating new materials to build new products, as the materials that went into the ones that have just been disposed of are now lost.

If your products are buried in landfill, and are inert, then it is possible that they will have no further impact, but if they are incinerated (as around half of UK waste is), then this should be recognised for what it is: unnecessary and polluting incineration of potentially useful material, rather than “energy recovery” or “energy from waste.”

Packaging is a product in its own right, and one that has to perform a difficult technical task usually only once before being discarded. The value of packaging is almost always far lower than the value of the product it contains. This means that packaging designers have to work within severe budgetary constraints, and that the performance specification of the packaging is critical, since damage to the expensive product cannot be tolerated.

Packaging is also perceived as having a greater detrimental impact on the environment, as consumers interact with it so frequently in our linear economy. All this means that green packaging design is a real challenge. Low impact packaging must do its job perfectly (otherwise all the impacts of manufacturing the product are for nothing) using easily segregated and recycled materials.

There is great public pressure to eliminate plastics from waste. This is justified, as plastics pollution is a huge and increasingly recognised problem, but it should be met with some caution, as packaging is there to do a job. If it is not there, the unintended consequence may be reduced product shelf life and higher product waste, which can have a greater impact overall.

Packaging design requires specialist skills, but everyone can ask simple questions:

Many products are designed to be used once and then discarded. This results in a steady stream of sales and is the foundation of many lucrative business models. However, it is only sustainable because the full costs of this model are not paid by the business. The environmental costs of extraction, processing, use and disposal of these products are borne by the planet, at no cost to the business As a result, in combination with the symbiotic cultural influence industry, in only a handful of decades this business model has led us to the brink of collapse of planetary support systems that are essential for the survival of both human and non-human species. Another handful of decades doing the same thing will push us all over that brink.

One approach that tries to address this is the Circular Economy. Popularised by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation [30] (which also has some excellent resources), the aim of this approach is to transform the linear, consumptive economy we all recognise (at least in the “developed” world) into a circular economy, where consumption is sustainable, energy renewable, and waste does not exist.

It is not easy to transform an existing linear business model into a circular model, or start a new circular business, in a linear economy which is designed to ignore environmental costs and reward overconsumption. But it is possible, and enormously rewarding. Here are some ideas, and examples of how it has been done.

This approach replaces the concept of a product with the service that the product delivers. Do you really want to own a car, with all the associated responsibilities, depreciation, and long periods of paying for something you don’t use? Or would it make more sense for you to buy the service of being able to move from one place to another?

For many use cases, it makes more sense to pay for the service. And if you are paying for the service, not the product, it is in the interests of the product’s manufacturer to ensure that their product is efficient, robust and repairable; and because products spend less time sitting doing nothing, you need fewer of them. Circular economy business models deliver the same (or better) service than the traditional approach, with a greatly reduced environmental impact.

Calculating your carbon footprint does not directly help you to reduce your emissions, but it is an essential tool for targeting carbon reduction actions, and for tracking progress. New tools like Sage Earth Carbon Accounting [31] allow you to generate an accurate carbon footprint with minimal effort, and to check on your progress as often as you like. Sage Earth Carbon Accounting’s output is linked to these carbon reduction actions, so you can use your carbon footprint to target which actions will have the greatest impact in reducing your emissions, and then track how well you are doing.

As carbon footprinting develops over the coming years, there will be a shift from generic to specific emissions factors, so that your footprint will become ever more accurate, and more useful for targeting carbon reduction actions.

Small businesses are increasingly being asked to report on their carbon emissions, as their products and services form part of the supply chain of other (usually larger) businesses, which have committed to reduce their emissions. This can be a particular problem if several customers require this information, all in different formats. To resolve this issue, there have been a few attempts to develop a common standard.

PPN 06/21 [32] is the UK Government’s carbon reporting standard. Any business bidding for Government tenders with a value over £5m per year must prepare a PPN compliant report; not if they win, but if they want to bid. NHS procurement has taken this a step further by removing the threshold: any business bidding for any NHS tender must comply.

The PPN report includes basic emissions figures for the business, and a Carbon Reduction Plan (CRP) setting out how the business intends to reduce these emissions. A simple way to comply with this requirement is to generate a carbon footprint using Sage Earth Carbon Accounting, then use this document to select relevant carbon reduction actions to build your CRP.

Bankers for Net Zero (B4NZ) has developed an SME standard33 which is a little broader in scope than PPN 06/21. Its goal is to provide a standard which all banks can use to measure their own financed emissions. Most banks are signatories to the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) [34], which requires them to measure the emissions associated with their lending activity, to improve the quality of that measurement, and to reduce the level of emissions. The B4NZ standard is designed to facilitate this process, and to unlock billions in funding for decarbonisation projects.

The European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) has developed a voluntary reporting protocol [35] for SMEs in Europe. This is much more wide-ranging standard, going well beyond just climate impacts.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/

[2] Homepage | GHG Protocol

[3] What are climate misinformation and disinformation and how can we tackle them? | UNDP Climate Promise

[4] A-IND_329_04_Electrification_Industrial_Heat_WEB.pdf

[5] How green is your electricity? Introducing Good Green Supply | Good Energy

[6] Influence: Science and Practice - Wikipedia

[7] Homepage - The 89 Percent Project

[8] Kusuma, Paul & Fatzinger, Brendan & Bugbee, Bruce & Wheeler, Ray & Soer, Wouter. (2021). LEDs for Extraterrestrial Agriculture: Tradeoffs between Color Perception and Photon Efficacy. 10.13140/RG.2.2.25730.61129.

[9] AC power - Wikipedia

[10] Carbon intensity of electricity generation. Our World in Data.

[11] Electricity production by source, United Kingdom. Our World in Data.

[12] Renewable energy certificates threaten the integrity of corporate science-based targets | Nature Climate Change

[13] BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science, Miscounting Carbon, EU Funding Stalemate, and How to Make a Royal Hologram

[14] How it works - Science Based Targets Initiative

[15] Homepage | GHG Protocol

[16] Global Wind Atlas

[17] An introduction to the sustainable travel hierarchy - Energy Saving Trust

[18] Health benefits of walking and cycling: preventable early deaths | The Health Foundation

[19] Factcheck: 21 misleading myths about electric vehicles - Carbon Brief

[20] Electric vehicles use half the energy of gas-powered vehicles » Yale Climate Connections

[21] Government Cycle To Work Scheme - Bike 2 Work Scheme

[22] Home - The Carbon Literacy Project

[23] Carbon Accounting Software | Sage Earth Carbon Accounting

[24] The Chancery Lane Project

[25] F_gas_regulation_in_Great_Britain.pdf

[26] MotherTree's Carbon Emissions Bank League Table - Updated June 2023

[27] Analysis of CDP submissions 2023.

[28] Skills for Planet - Design Council

[29] We are Fairphone

[30] https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/

[31] Carbon Accounting Software | Sage Earth Carbon Accounting

[32] Procurement Policy Note 06/21: Taking account of Carbon Reduction Plans in the procurement of major government contracts - GOV.UK

[33] From-Burden-to-Benefit.pdf

[34] PCAF website

[35] VSME Standard.pdf