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Crowdsourced reporting: How Greenr is simplifying the emissions landscape

Accurate emissions reporting is essential in the race to becoming a net zero economy

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Accurate emissions reporting is essential in the race to becoming a net zero economy

There's a paradox in coverage of the climate crisis. People are told to change their diet and habits - eat less meat, carry a reusable coffee cup, take more public transport - all while the majority of blame is laid at the feet of just a few companies. So, which is true? Is it individuals or institutions?

The reality is that both are linked. Companies, especially those in highly polluting industries, do generate a huge amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; but on a macro scale, so do people. Cutting your own direct emissions can also help companies slash their own indirect output.

The key is in those words, ‘direct' and ‘indirect', referring to how emissions are reported and tracked. In climate parlance, direct emissions are ‘Scope 1': they come from owned or controlled sources like factories and company vehicles. Indirect emissions are either scope 2 or scope 3, depending on their source: scope 2 come from the generation of purchased energy, and scope 3 is simply everything else: purchased goods, business travel, employee commuting, waste disposal - even a company's investments.

Large organisations are legally required to report scope 1 and 2 emissions, but scope 3 emissions remain voluntary for now. Reporting is likely to become mandatory as the UK draws closer to its net zero target, but accuracy is elusive. How do you easily and quickly assign a carbon output to an employee who drove a petrol car to work, versus the one who took the bus but got stuck in traffic? What about the emissions value of a business lunch, where one person had fish and the other had steak?

Simply put, you don't - you get them to do it instead.

Collaborative carbon tracking

As well as being a winner at the Women in Technology Excellence Awards 2021, Gabrielle Bourret-Sicotte, who recently completed a PhD in solar photovoltaics, is the co-founder of Greenr: an app for people to track their carbon footprint. She says its development was largely inspired by the questions she faced from her friends and family.

"Because I was working in that climate sphere...a lot of my friends and family would ask me quite tricky questions, like ‘Is it actually good to be vegetarian if I'm importing green beans and avocados from South Africa and Egypt, isn't it better to just eat local eggs?', or, ‘If I'm having a day trip with my three friends to Edinburgh, is it better to drive there in one car that we share or is it best to take a train if the train is going to be empty? What's the difference in carbon footprint and what can we actually do?'"

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Soft-boiled eggs and cereal on a rustic table.

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Apps like Greenr can help people to make informed choices about food and travel

Greenr's users can compare a journey by car or by public transport, see which of their favourite breakfasts is better for the planet (the egg and soldiers and I had at the weekend apparently puts out 445g of CO2, while my weekday go-to of porridge with fruit and nuts, made with oat milk, is less than half that), and share it all with their employer, helping to track those tricky scope 3 emissions - which are just as if not more important than the other types.

"For example, Boston Consulting Group, Bain [and Company], McKinsey, all those consultancy and financial services firms: between 95 and 98 per cent of their footprint is scope 3. Scope 3 is business commute, employee travel, business flights, business lunches and all those other really hard-to-capture data points. They don't report on those yet as much because it's really hard to measure, and so that's what Greenr wants to help with."

Offloading the burden of carbon tracking to employees can massively simplify scope 3 reporting; even more so if you add incentives and - this is key - make it simple.

"[The data for] Scope 3...is quite discombobulated, it's all over the place, people don't really report it. If you have a business lunch people sometimes don't even expense things... Whereas with Greenr you can put in your actual number plate and it'll say ‘OK, the emissions of your [car] are X and you drove to work, it was 120 kilometres so here you go'."

In its aim to be a more B2B-focused tool, Greenr is keeping simplicity at the forefront; soon it will be possible to link the app directly to other business products like expenses systems and emails, so "if you book a train, Greenr will automatically calculate that carbon footprint." The data is fed into a live dashboard showing employee emissions.

A tool for change

As mentioned above, scope 3 reporting is currently entirely voluntary for firms of all sizes - and SMEs have no legal requirement to report even scope 1 or 2 emissions. This is concerning, as small and medium firms make up about half of the UK's corporate carbon footprint, but often lack the resources to set up dedicated sustainability teams.

"That's what Greenr positions itself as now: a free SME business calculator for your emissions available on our website to help the hairdressers, the plumbers, the less-than-500 people businesses...to try to baseline their emissions. And then you can roll out the Greenr app, which is the same one you can download yourself.

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A family of bakers stood at the front door of their artisan bakery

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Small businesses generate about half of the UK's corporate carbon emissions, but lack the resources to track and report their emissions

"You roll out the Greenr app to all your employees and then you get them to compete against one another to have the lowest carbon footprint, to try to engage from the top and from the bottom so the whole company is holistically more sustainable."

Greenr is set to launch an online version of its calculator - embeddable on a customer's website - soon, and is always looking for new ways to reach its core market.

"We're really trying to reach as many people as possible and help all those SMEs that don't really have a plan at the moment. They will need to, because the government is expecting them to report on their emissions."

Cause and solution

Technology and climate change have a tempestuous relationship. On one hand, tools like Greenr and the cloud can have a real impact on lowering GHG emissions - even more when you consider tech's role in driving forward green energy grids, sustainable fusion and similar projects. On the other hand, the combined heat and carbon output of the world's computing needs is growing quickly: emails alone produce 2,000 tons of carbon every minute.

There is no quick and easy answer, but technology innovations like Greenr will certainly continue to be important as we race to avoid the worst effects of climate change.