How we assign specific carbon intensities to accounting categories is a central question for Sage Earth. We have developed a framework in conjunction with our in-house sustainability consultants that groups spending by environmental impact and applies a relevant carbon intensity based on a series of inputs from published data sources.

On top of this base, you can provide additional activity data for a quarterly reporting period in the company profile section. Currently you can provide specific data on buildings, travel, vehicles, energy and F-gases, with more activity sections coming soon. When you supply activity data, the calculations are worked out on the specific conversion factor for the activity (e.g. kgs of CO2e per litre of fuel) and replace the spend-based calculations from your accounting data.

In the case of vehicles, we start with a simple survey on fuel purchasing. For fuel type, if the accountancy invoice doesn’t stipulate which, we have to have a fall-back conversion factor for generic road-fuel. For vehicle types, the uk.gov conversion factors do happily contain the generic per-mile conversion factor - ‘Average car (fuel & size unknown)’. In the future, we intend to build a more comprehensive vehicle survey that requests info on specific cars, mileage etc.

Due to the huge variability in the CO2e values for different refrigerants, there is no generic conversion factor we can use so this is a tricky one to estimate. We rely on customers to provide us specific information on the use of F-gases as it’s very important to get this right. Due to the inordinate impact F-gases can have on global warming, they are carefully controlled under strict legislation and the information on quantities used by suppliers is a legal requirement. With that in mind, we hope our customers will make the necessary enquiries to find out the information if use of F-gases applies to them.