Green Small Business – our new climate partner!

As part of our commitment to SDG 13 Climate Action, we’re on a mission for our business to be carbon net zero by 2025.

We realised that we’ve not spoken much about our progress on our journey to net zero. Mainly because we still have lots to learn about carbon reduction and it’s an ever-changing space. What felt right for our business two years ago, isn’t fit for purpose now, and so we’re learning more every day about what we need to do differently. Our first climate partnership wasn't the right fit for our business but it gave us a good starting point. We didn’t know enough two years ago to make a more informed choice and things have also moved on.

So we set about finding a new partner that would interrogate our business further, and in more detail, to steer us on our journey to net zero. We also wanted to work with someone that could offer 1:1 in person bespoke support and training for us, as well as our supply chain.

We were first introduced to Tim Maiden at Green Small Business through UK for Good last year and we asked him to support us to understand our business environmental footprint much better. Tim agreed (thankfully!), and since then has helped us to re-measure our carbon footprint and report on data from every aspect of our business for the period Nov 2021- Oct 2022.

We have discovered that our carbon emissions across scopes 1, 2 and 3 totalled 26.3 tonnes Co2 which is significantly lower than the average for businesses in our sector. This felt like a positive start. Our emissions were also a lot lower than our first measure using our previous climate partners’ ‘online estimator’ for a small service-based business like ours. That one previously came out at 137tonnes Co2e - which we then offset.

We are now getting Tim’s help to understand how a small business like ours, with a very small footprint, can actually become ‘Net Zero’ and the challenges we might face. And we promise to share how that’s all going when we have more answers.

Achieving Green Small Business certification is another step in our journey to net zero and feels like a more positive way to show our ongoing environmental commitment to our employees, clients, local communities and our supply chain. Thank you for all your support so far, Tim. AG is proud to be a certified Green Small Business!

If you’re an SME curious about becoming carbon zet zero, learn more about how Green Small Business can help you here.