A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, service, product, or country. Within businesses, it is particularly the supply chain that is responsible for a lot of emissions. A careful analysis is thus needed to understand where emissions come from and how to reduce them. Read more about the carbon footprint in our article.
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What is a carbon footprint?
The term “carbon footprint” is used to describe the full extent of direct or indirect carbon emissions released into the environment. This is important as emissions play a huge factor in climate change and are often a consequence of human activities. Carbon footprints can be calculated for individuals, businesses, and even entire countries.
Calculating your carbon footprint
Generally, a carbon footprint is calculated by considering the total sum of carbon dioxide emissions induced by certain activities in a given time frame. There are various charts, resources, and online calculators which can assist in calculating a carbon footprint.
A lot of factors play a role into this calculation. For an individual, this might include driving to the mall by car, buying apples from New Zealand while living in Europe, or taking flights to Bali for the summer holidays.
For businesses calculating the carbon footprint can include how much electricity is consumed, what equipment is used, and how items are manufactured, shipped, and sold.
Reducing your carbon footprint
For individuals, reducing the carbon footprint is quite straightforward and often simply necessitates a change in lifestyle choices. For instance: using a bike instead of a car, avoiding travel by airplane, changing to a renewable energy provider, and eating less meat.
But what about businesses and their supply chains?
Currently, supply chains contribute significantly to a company’s carbon footprint. The supply chain can amount to four times the carbon footprint of the business’ own direct operations. However, with increased complexity of supply chains, understanding and reducing the carbon footprint demands a lot of considerations. Inchainge’s business simulation games can be of help in understanding where in the supply chain emissions generally stem from and how they can be reduced. The following steps should be taken into account:
1. Understand your supply chain
Take a look at each individual step in your supply chain. Start with distribution to customers, working your way upstream to suppliers.
2. Find potential sources
For each step, determine the potential sources of emissions. Keep in mind that there can be multiple sources per stage in the supply chain.
3. Set targets
Think of how much natural resources you want to save or how much waste you want to reduce. Define these targets explicitly for each step in the supply chain.
4. Think of concrete actions
For each of the stages in the supply chain, what kind of actions could you think of to reduce the carbon footprint and reach your targets?
Why is it important to reduce your carbon footprint?
The reduction of a business’ carbon footprint does not only have a positive impact on the environment, but is essentially an optimization process. A reduction of the carbon footprint of a company can streamline business and production operations to an optimal point. Additionally, it also implies cost savings for the business as many factors leading to an increased carbon footprint involve the excessive use of resources. Therefore, carbon footprint reduction is of importance for businesses.
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Business games
A high-performing value chain needs the collaboration of team members from across the organization. Tearing down silos and creating the right cross-functional mindset, however, can be a serious challenge. So, what do you need in order to achieve success? Ideally, you’d like your team to experiment with different scenarios wherein they learn to overcome various obstacles.
Sustainability
With the growing urgency of combating climate change and the increased need for more sustainable development, it has become inevitable for companies to adapt to a changing world. But what does sustainability actually mean? And how can your business transform its value chain to become more sustainable? In this article, Inchainge discusses everything you need to know about sustainability. Furthermore, we will inform you about our business games. Our business simulations help you grasp crucial strategies that allow businesses to continue their growth sustainably.
