December 1, 2023

Creating the carbon reduction plan

Whenever the United Nations Nations’ Conference of Parties takes place, there is global, wall to wall media coverage of the challenges we face as a human race. The rhetoric, the outrage, and the horrific stories of impact due to the changing nature of our climate are littered across social media accounts. #COP28 has been particularly controversial.

The global picture that is COP28 falls coincidentally with our own environmental achievement last week – and the next stage in our ISO14001 certification; the delivery of our first carbon reduction plan. This is the culmination of hard work and a lot of late nights, but we have done it – more about that in a minute.

With both events happening in the same week, something occurred to me. It is so easy to listen to the media around international events and think climate change is only about nation states and big corporations – particularly those in the fossil fuel industry. But with 5.5m small and medium enterprises accounting for 99% of employers in the UK, we have a massive role to play. Sadly it is a role that gets little media attention.

The completion of our first carbon reduction plan is significant as it sets out our road to net zero.  This has been a real team effort linking our sustainability team, our management team and crucially our colleagues on the production line. Working alongside us has been our fantastically supportive advisors, who have been an important asset to the teams at EUMAR TECHNOLOGY LIMITED and sister company Ubersorb.

The carbon reduction plan is simple to understand and importantly asks questions about us as a business and as a board. The report details:

• Current emissions – what we are producing in CO2 per tonne
• Our emissions reduction targets – detailing our near-term and long-term science-based carbon reduction targets
• Our baseline emissions footprint – a record of the greenhouse gas emissions produced before we started to put in place climate change measures
• Impact of completed carbon initiatives to date

Having this level of data laid out for the first time allows us to pinpoint where we can make improvements and the task we have ahead. For those companies who have yet to go through this process, I can’t say it was easy and the level of data we needed to produce was significant. But it was all there – we just had to think differently about how we looked and used the data at our fingertips. Again, it was a great way to get a grasp on the data we were producing.

So what does this mean for us as companies? 2024 will be an incredibly exciting year for both Eumar Technology and Ubersorb. We have ambitious plans to move forward with modernisation, redesign and delivering on a range of new partnerships. This Carbon Reduction Plan means we can now do that fully informed of the way forward to achieve our goal of ISO14001 and #ISO14064 accreditation. It brings together the reduction in environmental impact and our business growth.

If companies would be interested in talking to us about how we have developed our Carbon Reduction Plan or indeed, any of our #ISO14001 journey we would be happy to share our insight. So please do get in touch!