#qnipsgoesgreen – our journey to CO2 neutrality! | PART 1

qnips goes green

Over the last 10 years, we as a team and the qnips platform have constantly evolved. We have followed new trends and technologies and were always on the lookout for the latest innovations. Together with our customers, we have taken on new tasks and challenges and allowed ourselves to be inspired. Our team has now more than doubled in size and with this development we also take our corporate responsibility even more serious. Therefore, we would like to make a positive contribution to climate protection and start our journey to CO2 neutrality!

Sustainability also has an important meaning for us

For our customers in contract catering, the topic of sustainability has long been an important factor for future orientation. Thanks to their input, we have been able to implement several projects together, with which our customers have already been able to take steps towards carbon neutrality. Now, with qnips as a company, we would also like to take concrete responsibility in terms of sustainability. We want to become climate neutral and reduce our carbon footprint, or rather offset it. To this end, we want to achieve this goal as a company in the first step, in order to subsequently also make our products carbon neutral.

How are carbon emissions measured for CO2 neutrality in the first place?

The so-called “GHG Protocol” is used to guide the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions. As early as the 1990s, the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) began working with corporate partners to develop an action plan for climate change and GHG emissions measurement. In 2001, the first version of the GHG Corporate Standard was published and has been supplemented with additional guidelines and calculation tools to this day. The GHG Protocol (GreenHouseGas) establishes comprehensive global and standardized frameworks for measuring and managing GHG emissions in the private and public sectors, from value chains and from mitigation actions. (cf. https://ghgprotocol.org/standards)

How can a company measure its own carbon footprint for CO2 neutrality?

Carbon emission are tracked in three phases: Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3

We start our journey by scoping and collecting important data on our current carbon footprint. How do our employees get to work and what fuels do they use? What about supply chains for office supplies and how much carbon is generated by the use of software and computers? With Cozero, we have found a partner that helps us with exactly these questions. We can clearly and transparently track all our emissions and at the same time make an initial assessment. The Cozero dashboard helps to clearly implement the GHG protocol for measuring the company’s own emissions and divides the scoping data into three areas.

Scope 1 includes all carbon emissions that qnips as a company causes directly, i.e. those emitted by our office building and our company cars.Scope 2 includes all additional emissions that we cause, e.g. emissions caused by purchased electricity, district heating and refrigeration technology for our own use.Scope 3 includes all emissions that we cause in addition to our actual business activities, such as business trips, IT, parcel shipping etc.

Our experience with scoping carbon emissions

When we started to take an in-depth look at the emissions we cause as a company, it was not so easy at first to differentiate exactly which data is relevant for us as a company in the first step and is not caused by the use of our products. In addition, our colleagues from the back office in particular were faced with the task of searching through all the receipts and invoices from last year for the corresponding scope. The data in Scope 3 was also a challenge, as it only indirectly relates to us as a company and we had to do research at many points with service providers and partners to determine the corresponding quantities and required data.

How we become carbon neutral!

Additionally, we had to look in depth at how we were going to manage the internal coordination for maintaining the data. Many contracts and billings don’t always have the same billing periods, so the data in the dashboard has to be continuously updated, which can also change the amount of carbon emissions. For items such as electricity consumption or energy, however, scoping was easier than expected because we were able to track the calculated totals from the incidental cost statements. So we are on a constantly changing optimization process and are happy to have reached a first intermediate goal with the completion of the scoping.

qnip’s CO2 emissions last year – where do we go from here?

With the completion of the scoping process, we now have a first certainty about our carbon emissions and thus a basis on which we can now build measures for CO2 neutrality. About 115 tons of carbon dioxide we emitted as a company in the period January 2020 until now. That is as much as two-thirds of the emissions emitted by a fully occupied airplane on a flight from Frankfurt to South Africa. The main sources of this were the fuel use of our leased vehicles and the use of purchased digital services e.g. such as internal management programs. People often underestimate the carbon footprint of digital products and tools such as computers, laptops and internet use. How we now deal with this carbon footprint and develop measures for neutralization and compensation you will learn in PART 2 of our journey to CO2 neutrality!