There’s a good amount of call for businesses to take action on the climate crisis right now (and rightly so, we all have our part to play), but it can be hard to know where to start.

Harder still can be knowing how great an impact you can expect to have.

Here I’ll quickly break down the essentials of carbon footprinting for businesses, and how we go above-and-beyond when tailoring footprinting for Optical businesses.

Carbon accounting (working out all the ways your business activities contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and how much) conventionally spans three “scopes” as outlined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol:

Scope 1 covers on-site combustion. So if you own a furnace, here’s where you account for the fuel it burns! Most optical practices don’t own a furnace of course – but if you have a gas or oil-fueled boiler heating your premises, or own any fleet vehicles with internal combustion engines, this is where you include them.

Scope 2 covers purchased energy, ie. Your electricity bill. Almost half of electricity generated in the UK is produced through the burning of coal or natural gas, and these things have a carbon footprint. However, if your electricity comes from a renewable supplier, congratulations! Your energy is carbon neutral!

Scope 3 covers, well… everything else! It’s essentially the movement of people and products through a business. The conventional approach for big-businesses is to be as stringent as possible for Scope 3, including just core business travel and some supply chain emissions immediately up and down-stream. That’s fine - but we can do better!

For some very large organisations – take the NHS, for example (and an example of a UK organization being very proactive on it’s journey to Net Zero) - some things will be acknowledged as relevant or key to a business’s functioning but too far out of their control, too complicated to accurately account, and too expensive to consider offsetting – so they’re classed as “Out of scope”.

Patient travel is a great example of this – with so many patients (and visitors) travelling to NHS care locations around the country, their combined carbon footprint is colossal. The NHS can’t control how far they travel, or how they travel, or how efficiently they travel. The numbers are so variable you couldn’t get a reliable figure for it without massively over-compensating, and that’s not even to mention that it’s not the NHS’s responsibility to cover the carbon-bill of their patients’ travel! So “out of scope” is fine at such a scale.

Drop this down to the scale of a single practice though, and it’s remarkably easy to get a pretty clear picture of how far your patients travel, and how. What’s more, you can ask them! It’s a great opportunity to open a sustainability dialogue!

What practices find, when they set out to calculate the carbon footprint of their patient travel, is that it’s really quite easy to say with confidence how far your patients travel on average to get to you (one PMS will even show you a heat-map of where your patients live!).

When we go through Carbon Footprinting with clients, we don’t hold back. We cover absolutely everything we can think of that’s relevant to the business’s operations, and we get a number on it – from the carbon footprint embodied in the products sold (kgs per item), through to emails sent (mg per message)! Not because you strictly have to*, but because you can, and it’s no skin off your nose to go that extra mile – particularly when compared to the difference it makes to patients who care about the climate crisis!

 Once you’ve got a number on the carbon footprint of your business activity, you see if there are any viable areas to reduce your footprint, and then you can offset the remaining footprint to bring your contribution to the climate crisis down to zero! That's where the term "Net Zero" comes from - you still have some unavoidable gross emissions, but through verified offsetting you're negating your impact to bring your net emissions down to zero.

Then you get to say things like “Your visit to us today was 100% carbon neutral” to your patients, and watch them light up! Because that’s a little opportunity to show that you care, and that you’ll go above and beyond to look after them.

On the subject of offsetting – there’s a lot of scrutiny towards certain types of carbon offsetting, and rightly so, it’s important to do it right! But when you’re doing it right, it’s very worth doing. And when you offset your carbon footprint via the not-for-profit organization Net Zero Eyecare, you’re directly funding verified carbon-offsetting projects of the very highest standards that contribute to truly sustainable societies around the world.

It's true that offsetting isn’t the entire solution, and it’s very important to marry offsetting with committed, realistic reductions to one’s carbon footprint.

Here’s the rub – when you look at a practice’s complete carbon footprint, there’s not actually much room to make reductions. Sure, you can switch to a renewable supplier and knock a tonne or two off your carbon footprint (a very quick,important and easy win, I must say), and maybe you can incentivize your staff to car-share when possible. But in the world in which we currently reside, and without committing to reducing the activities most key to keeping your business afloat (patient visits and products sold), your options for reductions are sorely limited.

Globally, and over the next few decades, dramatic emissions reductions are absolutely paramount and the race to Net Zero may be as skewed as 20/80, Offsetting / Reduction - that's what bod's like the IPCC advise anyway.

However, in any given practice looking to make a real impact here and now, it’s more like 90/10, Offsetting / Reduction.

You don’t have to wait to go Net Zero – in fact it’s better if you don’t. We’ve got two years to pass peak global emissions and secure a livable future for humanity… and global net emissions are still increasing.

If you’d like to do your bit – and maybe a little bit more – to go Net Zero and make the world a better place here and now, you can read more about our Net Zero Optics programme here.

And drop me a line: andrew@practicebuilding.co.uk

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