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Identifying and offsetting carbon footprints across restaurants and hospitality
CategoriesSustainable News

Identifying and offsetting carbon footprints across restaurants and hospitality

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: The UK’s hospitality sector is responsible for around 15 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. One company tackling this issue is Skoot, a multi-faceted platform with a variety of solutions that help businesses, communities, and individuals cut their carbon footprintsm by enabling them to identify, offset, and avoid carbon emissions. The company’s Eco-Contribution tool focuses on restaurants and hospitality businesses.

Video source Skoot

With Skoot, businesses can first calculate their own net emissions. Then, the Eco-Contribution solution allows restaurants and venues to counteract the emissions generated from every meal or bill – taking into account food miles and other contributors – by planting trees. The company estimates that each tree can remove 6 kilogrammes of CO2 per diner and, over the course of its lifetime, could trap up to 1 tonne of CO2. 

Not only does Skoot’s hospitality tool help to reduce an establishment’s overall carbon footprint, at no additional cost to the business, but it also empowers customers to be greener when they’re eating out. Upon receiving a bill, diners can choose to pay the optional Eco-Contribution – as set by the restaurant – and offset emissions from the meal. Depending on the restaurant’s preference, this Eco-Contribution can either be applied per table or per person.

The tool can be easily integrated across any existing till system, and to make it even easier to implement, Oracle Simphony and Micros users are able to download the Eco-Contribution app directly from the Oracle marketplace onto their POS (point of sale) system and integrate the solution remotely. 

Skoot has now planted over 800,000 trees, and countered over 4,000 tonnes of CO2. The company’s aim is to expand the environmental support it offers, broaden its collection of sustainability projects, and grow operations to new countries – having already confirmed its first clients in America and South Africa. 

Springwise has also spotted other innovations in the archive that help offset carbon footprints, like one platform that helps employees make tangible company-wide eco-friendly changes or another that makes it easier to track and manage carbon offsets.

Written By: Archie Cox

Reference

A solution for calculating and offsetting emissions from ad campaigns
CategoriesSustainable News

A solution for calculating and offsetting emissions from ad campaigns

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: Few people stop to think about the carbon emitted by browsing the internet, but running and cooling servers and powering data transfer uses a lot of carbon. Each video or display ad impression represents an average of one gramme of CO2 emissions, which may not sound like a lot, until you consider how many ad impressions are viewed worldwide.

Now, Sharethrough, an omnichannel supply-side advertising exchange, and Scope3, a supplier of supply chain emissions data, have partnered to create GreenPMPs, the first supply-side platform (SSP) to offer media with net-zero carbon emissions.

The GreenPMP initiative enables brands to allocate a portion of their ad spend towards the funding of high-quality carbon removal activities, in order to compensate for the carbon emissions generated by running digital ad campaigns. Ultimately, this should make it easier for brands to reach their goals of net-zero emissions.

Video source GreenPMPs

The programme places a Green icon on ads to alert consumers that it is sustainable. Using Sharethough’s GreenPMPs site, advertisers can measure their emissions across the entire programmatic supply chain in real time, using data from Scope3. Using a Carbon Emissions Estimator, advertisers can get an approximation of how much carbon waste an ad campaign could potentially generate, and then remove their ads from high-emission or low-performing sites to reduce their overall campaign emissions.

Surveys show that consumers tend to favour brands that demonstrate their sustainability and eco-credentials. In the archive, Springwise has spotted other brands making a sustainable change, including a pasta brand that saves energy by promoting passive cooking and a fashion brand that promotes clothing resale.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

Reference

A platform verifies nature-based solutions for carbon offsetting
CategoriesSustainable News

A platform verifies nature-based solutions for carbon offsetting

By Zarkon Group,

Spotted: The number of organisations committing to climate targets and offsetting has been growing rapidly. However, this growth also represents a major challenge, because the voluntary carbon market is still in its infancy, meaning there is a lack of credible emission reduction programmes and questionable investments in carbon projects with no actual reductions.

Climate-tech startup Goodcarbon is working to change this by focusing on nature-based solutions (NbS), such as the conservation and restoration of forests or oceans. Through their platform, Goodcarbon connects NbS projects to capital, giving projects a stream of income and allowing organisations to offset their emissions with verified high-quality NbS projects. Project developers can also use the platform to sell Forward Credit contracts and auction ownership shares in their projects.

All projects listed on Goodcarbon are subject to a stringent verification process. The platform works together with existing verification and standardisation bodies such as Verra and Gold Standard, and also applies its own impact assessment scheme to ensure the platform only hosts the highest quality projects. The advantage for businesses is that not only can they invest, secure in the knowledge they are not greenwashing, but they can also use the platform to turn carbon offsetting into an investment opportunity.

According to many, the voluntary carbon market is largely non-transparent and is swamped with low-quality NbS projects that do not actually work. As Jerome Cochet, Co-Founder And Managing Director Of Goodcarbon, points out, “We have a major supply problem as project developers face significant challenges. They have high upfront costs, but a lack of funding, little appreciation of co-benefits such as biodiversity protection, and a high dependence on brokers. We are here to solve these challenges by converting natural capital into financial products.”

As of September 2022, thousands of organisations, representing $38 trillion, have committed to emission reduction targets approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). So it is no wonder that we are seeing a number of innovations aimed at offsetting. These include a platform that makes it easier for farmers to sell carbon credits, and a blockchain infrastructure for trading in forward carbon credits.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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