As a smaller business, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to sustainability.
Sure, we all do our best to use the right recycling bin at home, and bring our re-usable coffee cups to work. But with serious pressures now mounting from the government – which pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 – as a business, we find ourselves constantly asking: how can we do more, and how can we know what our true environmental footprint is?
Earth Day shines a light on these very issues. Taking place annually on April 22nd, Earth Day aims to “inspire awareness and appreciation for our environment”. For businesses, it’s a great time to reflect and think about how we can do our part to save the planet.
Here at Skout, the team agreed that it was time to step our sustainability game up, not only due to its growing role in ESG, legal compliance, client expectations (the list goes on…) but also, because it’s important to do the right thing – by our planet, our people, and for future generations to come.
Skout’s sustainability journey
Recently, we embarked on a new sustainability journey, assigning a ‘Sustainability Squad’ (cool name, right?) to assess our business’s current carbon footprint and map out our own journey towards net-zero.
We began by conducting the self-assessed Carbon Trust report, which provided us with our total carbon footprint in tonnes of CO2e. From here, we were tasked with coming up with our ‘carbon offset plan’ – which sees organisations cancel out their existing emissions by investing in carbon reduction projects – as well as our strategy to reduce in-house emissions moving forward.
In order to truly connect with ‘Mother Earth’ – and understand how we, as a team, can make a real impact on it – Skout has been taking part in ‘Walk the World’, a challenge where we’ve vowed to increase and pool together our daily steps in order to ‘virtually’ walk the diameter of the earth, setting off from our office here in Macclesfield. Our aim is to hike, cycle, run, swim (and everything in between) a total distance of 12,742 km (the distance of the diameter of the earth if you walked straight through the core) before the end of the year, and currently, we are in Saskatchewan in Canada!
For our carbon offsetting plan, we plan to launch a membership with Ecologie in the coming weeks, which will see us plant five trees per employee, per month, and offset 4.5 tonnes of CO2 per employee, per month – far outweighing our current emissions.
Our sustainability pledges
To address our future carbon emissions, we’ve also devised a set of ‘sustainability pledges’, aimed at reducing the amount of carbon and waste we produce across every aspect of our business, and hold us environmentally accountable from this point onward.
To do this, we drilled down into our day-to-day activities as an agency, analysing everything through a sustainable lens, to pinpoint the key areas where we can make a difference to our carbon emissions as a business. We look forward to sharing these with you over the next few weeks, along with a breakdown of how to plan to achieve them using a variety of tactics and initiatives.
The road to net-zero is not an overnight one, but as a creative agency, we know that anything is possible once we put our heads together and come up with a solid action plan.
We are delighted to be sharing this new and exciting sustainability journey with you all, along with our sustainability pledges. The steps we’ve mentioned above will help us do our part in solving the current climate crisis, are they are beyond achievable for organisations of all different shapes and sizes.
So, we hope they spark some inspiration for your organisation this Earth Day, and encourage you to follow in our footsteps on this sustainability journey!
