A Review of GHG Protocol's Corporate Standard Training Webinar

July 23, 2015 The SSC Team

By: Alexandra Kueller

This July, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol offered an online training session that covered the basics of the Corporate Standard, and it was the perfect introduction to corporate greenhouse gas accounting. With the Corporate Standard being widely used among businesses and organizations world wide, this three day course was great for your first introduction to GHG accounting or even those who needed a refresher course.

The Corporate Standard Training allows participants to gain knowledge and skills in 7 different categories:

GHG Accounting and Reporting Principles
Business Goals and Inventory Design
Setting Organizational Boundaries
Setting Operational Boundaries
Tracking Emissions over Time
Identifying and Calculating GHG Emissions
Reporting GHG Emissions

Wanting a full, comprehensive knowledge of the Corporate Standards, I signed up for the webinar and gave it a go:

The Good

One of the biggest benefits of this course, unlike other GHG Protocol trainings, was that it had a live instructor. Being able to have your questions answered on the go is helpful, because all too often when you have to wait for the end of a presentation, you might have forgotten what you wanted to ask or don't remember what section of the presentation to reference.

Another great aspect of this webinar was the in-session exercises. After each main principle was covered, we were walked through the steps of how to complete that process on our own, and then given an exercise to do so. It was highly beneficial to have someone work through the problems with you and answer your questions on the spot.

The Bad

While the live aspect of the webinar was great overall, sometimes it could be a bit of a hassle. If the instructor ever went too quickly over a slide or you didn't catch what they said, you wouldn't be able to go back and re-listen. You did have the option of pulling up the powerpoint on your computer, but by doing so, you might have missed what the presenter was currently talking about.

Another downside was the length of course. By day three I was having difficulty staying focused. I think all 10.5 hours are necessary, but I would rather see it condensed into two days rather than three.

Overall

This course offered an excellent introduction to the Corporate Standard and GHG accounting. If you are new to emissions reporting or are wanting a formal class that breaks down the details, then I would highly encourage you to sign up for the next webinar. But if you are someone that has years of experience, then there really is no need for you to take this course.

Are simply mistakes holding back your sustainability? Find out how to correct those mistakes here!

4 Mistakes That Are Holding Back Your Company’s Sustainability

July 21, 2015 The SSC Team

By: Alexandra Kueller

Take a step back and examine your company’s sustainability. Is your company moving forward with its sustainability goals and initiatives? Or do you feel like your company could be doing more? If you identify with the latter, there might be some simple mistakes being made that is causing this problem.

Introduced in the Fast Company article “4 Business Decision-Makings Mistakes Are Holding You Back”, Romi Stein discusses common mistakes companies have made and how it has hurt them. Wanting to put a sustainability twist on the points discussed in that article, we have highlighted ways that these mistakes could be causing your sustainability initiatives some harm:

Failure to Learn

Have you ever been to a conference or event where an older person - someone with years of experience and knowledge - got on stage and lectured everyone about the "right way to do sustainability"? Did you then subsequently think to yourself, "but isn't there more than one way to do sustainability?"

That's because there is!

The field of sustainability is always changing, in the sense that new information and research is always being published. We are always finding better ways to track emissions and inventive ways to report sustainability initiatives, so there is no need to exclaim that there is a right way for sustainability. If someone isn't willing to learn new ways of approaching sustainability, they appear too entrenched in the past, and soon their sustainability will be too.

Failure to Anticipate

It’s the end of July, which means a lot of companies have either submitted their CDP reports for 2014 or are making their final edits. But more than likely there are companies that are scrambling to put together a year’s worth of emissions data and sustainability initiatives.

Sustainability, like any field or industry, has annual deadlines – whether set by the company or by other organizations. CDP and UNGC have deadlines to submit their reports, and many companies aim to publish their sustainability report around the same time every year. If a company does not anticipate these deadlines, that often means other sustainability work gets pushed to the side just to make sure the reports go out on time.

Failure to Adapt

Over the past few years, there has been a big push to bring materiality to sustainability, and slowly, companies are doing so. But what happens if your company doesn’t change and adapt to materiality or every other new trend? How much of an impact could that have?

Nothing in sustainability stays the same for long, which can make it difficult to tell what’s important to focus on. New reporting standards are released, new trends emerge, but there are instances where reporting standards account for these trends. With GRI’s G4 iteration, it plays up the importance of materiality and how companies should build their annual reports around it. If your company is ignoring materiality, it can look like they don’t take sustainability seriously.

Failure to Execute

One of the biggest ways to hold back a company's sustainability is by them simply failing to execute their sustainability plan. This could happen for a variety of reasons: your company isn't allocating the same resources to sustainability that it once did; you forgot to keep up with data tracking throughout the year; more pressing, non-sustainability related projects pop up.

No matter what your job, in whatever industry, this is going to happen - it's an inevitable part of having a job. But what will make the difference is how you react when facing these issues. Does your company just ignore all sustainability-related initiatives for the rest of the year, or are they doing something to make sure they are sticking to their plan?

Think your company could be a little more sustainable? Find out how to get your company moving towards sustainability here.

Tracking Progress with Your Sustainability Software

July 16, 2015 The SSC Team

This article was written as an expansion of our white paper “Choosing Sustainability Management Software for your Business” published in July 2011. Enjoy:

We started with the axiom “if you want to manage it, you have to measure it”. So now that you’ve given some thought to the software solution that you want to purchase, it’s critical for you to come up with your specific measurements. We’re not just talking about your carbon footprint or how many gallons of water you’re using. We’re talking about the primary way that you’ll keep score for yourself and your employees so that everyone can tell if you’re actually doing better. We’re talking about picking your Key Performance Indicators.

Type “Key Performance Indicators” into your Google search and you’ll get 6.4 million results (and counting). With so much written elsewhere on them, we thought it would be useful to give you some suggestions on what you might want to consider implementing as your key sustainability performance indicator. These “measurements of performance” are not a one-size-fits-all measurement – you have to figure out what makes sense for your business.

The most commonly used measures reflect your company’s Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. These may be represented as an absolute measure of your firm’s emissions (usually in tons) or in relative intensity, such as emissions per employee, emissions per retail area, or emissions per unit of production. These GHG totals will frequently be provided as “CO2e,” or “Carbon Dioxide Equivalent,” given that CO2 is the most commonly known green house gas ahead of others such as methane, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), and a host of other emissions.

A second form of sustainability KPI revolves around the use of energy, water, and other inputs to a company’s business process. This might include data on total energy or water usage or may again break down the metric on a relative intensity level. Due to the wide variety of potential inputs and outputs for a firm’s processes, there isn’t really a standard emission measure.

A third major form of sustainability KPI is focused around packaging and waste. This may take the form of the amount or weight of packaging involved in business operations. Or it may manifest itself as part of a “Zero Waste” pledge taken by a firm that is seeking to reduce, reuse, and/or recycle the byproducts of their business operations.

A fourth and (for now) final form of sustainability KPI is that which is customized and specific to your individual business. You know how you measure success financially, for employee performance, for sales performance, for safety performance. Maybe these measurements are part of an intensity ratio based on a per-revenue-dollar basis, a per-billable-hour basis, or maybe they are simply expressed in absolute values (total hours of lost productivity due to accidents). Maybe you can re-use those same measures for sustainability KPIs, or maybe you need to identify new ones.

To assist with getting you started on identifying your own KPI’s, here are some quick examples that fit each of the four types mentioned above. You could find many more from reviewing the Corporate Social Responsibility reports of the companies mentioned below as well as by reviewing your competitors, your partners, your suppliers and your customers own statements. No matter what approach you decide to take, figure out the measures that will be the right ones for YOU.