WolfPeak First Carbon Footprint

We learnt a number of things by going through the process of measuring our first carbon footprint that we hope can help other businesses take their first steps on the sustainability pathway.

1. The first year is the hardest.

Completing your first carbon footprint is the hardest one but we promise it gets easier from there! It will test your systems and processes and identify areas where they aren’t set up to collect the information that you need, but this is also an opportunity. Following our baseline carbon footprint, we updated our expensing and invoicing system to include better categorisation. This made the lives of our finance team a lot easier but it also made completing our second carbon footprint quicker because we could generate reports using categories specific to the carbon footprint rather than going through individual invoices.

2. Your biggest impacts are not always what you think.

Going into this process, businesses tend to have a sense of what their largest emissions sources will be but are often surprised when they see the final results and WolfPeak was no different! Our projects require us to travel a lot so we thought emissions from our vehicles would be the largest. However we were surprised that emissions from our employees working from home was our third largest source and equal to emissions from commuting to the office. As we transition back to more people working from the office, we are interested to see how this impacts our emissions and may influence how we manage our workforce in the future.

3. Beneficial internal and external tool.

A company’s carbon footprint is a beneficial tool to improve your environmental performance, resulting in several internal benefits to the company such as cost savings. Since completing our baseline carbon footprint, we have used this work in a number of other situations. The majority of tender submissions require businesses to outline how they are managing their environmental impacts and our carbon footprint demonstrates this. We are also completing our BCorp certification and getting our management systems ISO-certified, and our carbon footprint is a key aspect in meeting some of the certification criteria. We are currently completing our second carbon footprint for the 2023 financial year and are looking forward to seeing how our results compare to our baseline. Stay tuned for an update in the coming months!