Ctg sit23 hub banner.jpg

Emissions management case studies: RSA and Swiss Post

How technology is helping two major organisations to reduce their carbon footprint and energy bills

Insurance giant RSA uses Ecometrica for environmental data collection in all 34 countries that it operates in, and uses consolidated data to comply with the Companies Act and Defra’s standards on non-financial reporting.

“It satisfies a number of legal and best-practice requirements and helps us answer a wide range of investor and stakeholder questions,” says James Wallace, group head of corporate responsibility at RSA.

RSA has been reporting emissions since 1999 – almost prehistory in the corporate responsibility sector – and its emissions accounts are independently audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Some of the emerging markets in which RSA operates do not have the same reporting requirements as the UK, and so detailed data on emissions is not always available. And the number of RSA employees can be quite small so there is not the scope for complex or lengthy emission reporting. However, one of the benefits of Ecometrica’s software is that it is scalable for these small offices and data can be entered relatively easily.

“If you have an office with six people in it, what would you rather they do: keep your business running, or account for carbon?” says Wallace.

Consequently, some of the figures entered are estimates taken from electricity bills that might be shared among other occupants of the building. But the software provides industry-average emission profiles for each country, so the estimates entered locally can be checked against the country average.

“In the insurance sector you have offices, not factories or warehouses with huge energy consumption, so the cost saving is marginal in the scheme of things,” admits Wallace.

Nevertheless, RSA reports a 36 per cent reduction in emissions relative to turnover since 2006.
Accounting for emissions is usually used for external audiences – a CSR report or carbon disclosure project (CDP) filing – but it can also be an important tool in employee engagement.

“You need a communication programme to stimulate employee engagement in environmental initiatives and that requires accurate numbers,” says Wallace.

Swiss Post

When it comes to using IT to “green” a company, videoconferencing to replace business travel is usually cited before energy management. However, some multinationals have taken the concept a step further and now calculate their employees’ carbon footprint, specifically the business miles they travel.

Swiss Post, the postal service of Switzerland and the country’s second largest employer, needed to do this to comply with its ISO140001 certification. It uses WebExpenses (http://bit.ly/whdOID),
a cloud-based service initially designed to help organisations manage their expense claims, to which a carbon-tracking feature was added in 2010.

The carbon tracking module allows business travellers to track the carbon footprint of different types of transport, including cars, buses, trains and planes and calculate their carbon footprint using up-to-date, government-approved carbon and environmental data.

Carbon tracking software isn’t new, but conventionally produces results only at the reporting stage. WebExpenses carbon module works in real time, so business travellers can plan their route in advance to minimise their carbon footprint.

“We are able to pull concrete data relating to how much carbon we have used off the WebExpenses’ system, which has transformed the way we control and record our global emissions and enabled full transparency over what we spend,” says Max Luff, sustainability manager for Swiss Post Solutions.

Emissions management case studies: RSA and Swiss Post

How technology is helping two major organisations to reduce their carbon footprint and energy bills

Components

Tata's UK gigafactory project takes major step forward

Public Sector

National Grid is turning analogue to digital - Ctrl Alt Lead podcast

Green

AI to blame for Google's rocketing greenhouse gas emissions