Our Emissions Footprint Report 2022

**Total CO₂e* emitted in 2022**

1,526 tonnes

*Carbon dioxide equivalent, the universal unit of measurement to indicate global warming potential of greenhouse gas

Scope 1
Direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by Everflow: Stationary combustion equipment, e.g., boilers, used for building heating. Refrigerants used for cooling buildings.

Scope 2
Indirect emissions from purchased sources of energy that the company does not control, e.g., electricity.

Scope 3
All other indirect emissions from Everflow’s activities but from sources controlled by external organisations, e.g., mobile combustion from travel, outsourced services and purchased products, employee home working.

Workspace Emissions

Top ups of refrigerant in our offices which used air conditioning were responsible for 91% of our scope 1 emissions.

We outsource a substantial amount of our operations. Therefore, influencing our supply chain is very important.

Further Analysis

Purchased goods and services

82% of these (1,187tonnes CO₂e) were categorised as “other professional services”.
We categorised all those we had more oversight of below. It’s clear that how we purchase laptops is likely to have the most impact on our procurement, as it is most in our control and contributes the most emissions.
Switching to more sustainable facilities and influencing our landlords to adopt more sustainable practices can also have a large impact.

While lots of emissions are associated with our software subscriptions, many of these suppliers will be too large for us to influence, and as large businesses we know many of them are already pursuing sustainability.

Electricity and heating

Our hybrid working policy allows employees to work from home. As well as calculating the carbon footprint of our office spaces, we have therefore included emissions associated with home working in our scope 3 emissions.

Unfortunately, increased home working does not directly translate into decreased heating and power bills at our offices. However, we’ve calculated that these are, on average, offset by the decrease in employee commuting.

We carried out a detailed employee survey in December 2022 to understand how often employees worked from home and how employee’s home energy use varied when they did so. This enabled us to identify actions we could take to help employees reduce their energy bills, and we issued advice the same month. The survey achieved a 52% response rate (88 responses).

We found the following opportunities to reduce emissions associated with home working:

3/5 employees worked from home less than our company minimum of 2 days per week.
95% of respondents mainly used gas boilers to heat their homes, 88% had a thermostat to control their heating and around half (53%) used a programmer to automatically turn their heating on.
Almost two thirds (64%) of respondents said they heated their homes more than usual when working from home. However, this included 23% who only heated their working area more.
A third (34%) of respondents either lacked individual thermostatic controls for their radiators or were not using them efficiently.
A minority (11%) of employees were heating their homes to above normal room temperature when working from home.
At least a quarter of respondents did not heat their home for the whole time they were working there. Some may be heating it for unnecessarily long periods.
More than a third of respondents did not have full loft or wall insulation, and very few had floor insulation (only older homes with suspended floors over a cavity require this.)
Almost two thirds (64%) of respondents did not have 100% renewable electricity at home, a quarter (25%) did, and 11% did not know.
21% of respondents had used neither LED lights nor smart plugs and lights at home in 2022. 18% had used smart plugs and lights and 61% had used LED lights.

Travel

More than half (55%) of our emissions associated with travel (24 tonnes CO₂e) were from employee commuting.

In December 2022, we surveyed employees to understand commuting habits enabling us to estimate the total miles commuted by all employees with reasonable accuracy.

88% of respondents travelled to work by fossil fuelled cars – mostly alone. Respondents were as likely to have access to an EV as they were to use communal or zero emission modes of transport. 1 in 10 employees who commuted by car usually car shared.
41% of respondents spent more than half an hour commuting to work in 2022.

During 2022, we launched a salary sacrifice electric vehicle leasing scheme for our employees. So far more than 10 employees have taken the opportunity to switch away from a fossil fuelled car. We also coordinated a car sharing matching scheme.

In addition, we launched a hybrid working policy which allowed most employees to work from home 2-3 days a week. We calculate that every additional day per week that employees work from home should save 5 tonnes of CO₂e from commuting, and add 4.5 tonnes of CO₂e from additional heating and electricity use in the home, so a net half a tonne saving. Everflow Utilities Emissions Footprint Report 2022.

Regarding business travel, we identified that we could encourage greater use of greener hotels, public transport and car sharing when visiting other offices or travelling to other meetings and conferences, by revising our travel and expenses policy.

Most of the flights booked by the company are associated with one remote working director, and their emissions are offset by the airline as standard.

Emission Reduction

Our 2021 operational emissions were 829tonnes CO2e. This increased from 509 in 2020 because we have reported our air conditioning more accurately and doubled our employee numbers during 2021. We expect our emissions to increase as we grow as customers transfer from less sustainable legacy retailers, but we aim to reduce our intensity metrics (emissions per employee or £ revenue – see SBTs below).

We set medium term (2026) Science Based Targets for our net zero strategy, as follows:

Increase renewable electricity from 0% to 100%
90% of suppliers by spend covering purchased goods and services will have a net zero plan, ideally to SBTs, on their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions
90% suppliers engaged about reducing carbon emissions
50% customers engaged about reducing utilities usage
Reduce Scopes 1 and 2 GHG emissions 70% per employee
Reduce Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions 50% overall

Mission reduction initiatives planned for 2023

Move to our new HQ, that has a building energy rating of A, no gas heating and fast EV charging points for our employees.
Track electricity and water usage using smart meters for all offices.
Assess options to improve efficiency of air conditioning system with landlords.
Implement our long term Sustainability Strategy, with hard targets for achieving sustainable services and the way we operate.
Investigate funding sources to explore how we can make utility saving activities simple for our customers.
Launch our sustainable procurement policy to help employees prioritise and weigh up different aspects of sustainability when buying products and services.
Revise employee travel and expenses policy to state preferences of sustainable options.
Track our waste disposal.

Methodology

Produced in accordance with the GHG reporting protocol – corporate standard method for the period 01/01/2022 to 31/12/2022.

Data was collected from primary information sources, including direct interviews with building managers, employee surveys, employee FTE lists and official documentation (bills, invoices and purchase ledger).

Excludes emissions from purchased wholesale water, wastewater or waste collection services on behalf of our customers
Energy use in tech and sales offices calculated using average kWh/m2 for commercial buildings in the UK.
Average waste disposal assumed for number of employees, sector and size of buildings.
Emissions associated with procurement and services, including business travel without recorded mileage, and hotels, are based on expenditure.
Emissions associated with employee commuting are based on distance by vehicle type.
Employee commuting and home working emissions were calculated for the sample who completed our annual survey (88 people) then estimated for our entire workforce (155 FTE).
Included the optional emissions associated with working from home in scope 3, including T&E for electricity.
Modelled using DEFRA Emission Factors 2021 and UK Consumption-Based Accounts Data 2018.

All our emissions (including those omitted above) have been offset from 2021-23 through the purchase of carbon credits. Full-time equivalent (FTE) staff 151 square meters of office 1,536