October 2022
Two big barriers for any business setting out to reduce their impact on the planet are knowing where they are starting from and understanding what they should be aiming for. In an article about Design Declares, Dezeen highlighted that we had set “*no concrete carbon goals set for signatories”.* There are two reasons for this. Firstly, there is very limited guidance from any governing body on design industry emissions targets and secondly the creative industry is so diverse that any coverall figures would be irrelevant for many signatories. Nevertheless, we figure we need to try.
Let’s start with targets. Of course in the idea world we would all want to get to net-zero, but there are factors that will make this very challenging for many designers and design teams reading this, some of which are discussed further in this article. In April 2022, a UN IPCC report gave perhaps the simplest and most achievable targets: reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors by 50% by 2030. So let us start with that.
Next, we need to understand what contributes to our carbon emissions. For that we have reached out to co-founders of xtonnes Vanessa Macalliver and Bengt Cousins-Jenvey and Inhabit CEO Cameron Epstein and Senior Climate Strategist Dom Clarke for answers. Here is what they had to say…
xtonnes:
xtonnes helps designers, makers and constructors reduce their carbon emissions, by helping them quantity them, set targets and build an action plan to reduce. We do this for organisations, but increasingly also for the products and projects that they put out into the world.
Inhabit:
Inhabit was built to bring fast-paced decarbonisation to creative companies. Our team has experience working on some of the worlds leading climate work for brands like IKEA and M&S, and we’re now combining that experience with innovative tech to decarbonise the design industry. Since our beginnings in 2019 we’ve worked with firms like Pentagram, D&AD and Morrama, and our tools offer a cost-effective net-zero transition - aligned against the highest carbon management standards. We strive to guide our customers from their very first steps to achieving net-zero and, overall, our mission is to decarbonise the design world, creating a low-impact network that can produce climate conscious creative from the ground up!
Inhabit:
Sure! If we’re going to reduce our carbon impact we need to understand it, which first means measuring our greenhouse gas or GHG emissions. The 3 Scopes allow us to categorise the emissions we generate from our operations and from the wider value chain associated with our business activities.
In essence, scope 1 and 2 are emissions that we own and can control, in contrast to Scope 3 emissions that are generated as a result of what the business does but are not under direct control of the organisation. Here’s a little bit more about each of the Scopes: