Our impact
Annual impact measurement
Little Blue Research recognises that it has a responsibility to the environment beyond legal and regulatory requirements. We are committed to reducing our environmental impact and continually improving our environmental performance as an integral part of our business strategy and operating methods, with regular review points. We will encourage customers, suppliers and other stakeholders to do the same.
To identify, understand and address Little Blue Research’s environmental impact, we assessed the company’s carbon emissions between March 2023 to February 2024. We annually assess emissions generated by our main activities and calculate a total annual carbon footprint.
Using guidance from the Carbon Trust’s Carbon Footprint Guide and the Defra 2023 Emission Conversion Factors, the CO2e emissions within scopes 1 and 2 of the guide have been calculated, as well as scope 3.
The calculations assist in estimating the company’s largest emissions sources, allowing targeted sustainability practices to be carried out.
New for this year
At Little Blue Research, we are committed to continually improving our environmental impact by changing the way we work and how we operate. In 2024 we have:
-
Updated our methodology to include specific calculations for home working
-
New software added to data storage emissions calculations
-
Regularly reviewed our webpage to reduce size
-
Added additional procurement checks for the purchasing of goods based upon certifications
Total emissions = 2.4tCO2e
Little Blue Research donated £100 to the Woodland Trust to help them care for enough woodland to capture and store approximately 4tCO2e (Woodland Trust, 2024).
The decrease in emissions between 2022-2023, and 2023-2024 by a third can be attributed to the following factors:
-
Personnel changes between the assessment periods have led to a decrease in the homeworking and office emissions, as well as a change in commute routes to less carbon intensive journeys
-
No new equipment was purchased in the assessment period, so there are no emissions associated with electronics
-
Home and office working calculation methods have changed to more accurate methods which subsequently estimate emissions as lower than previously
Notes:
-
Office & household energy assumes average energy consumption to be constant across every working day;
-
Office emissions calculated using data from the Centre for Energy and Environment using data from CIBSE;
-
Household energy used Defra homeworking emissions estimates;
-
Appliances are excluded for this year as no new devices were purchased;
-
Business travel, i.e., journeys to and from conferences has been included for this year in the commute and business travel category
-
Find out more about the Woodland Trust here
What we're doing to reduce our impact
Office & household energy
We rent office space from Work.Life, a B Corp certified company which uses 100% renewable electricity providers¹.
Appliances
We plan on repairing our devices where possible instead of buying new devices, and recycling anything we can after repairing is no longer viable.
We reduce vampire energy consumption by encouraging employees to unplug devices and remove them from charge when not in use or at full battery.
Commute
We support flexible working arrangements enabling employees to work remotely part time.
Data storage
We reduce unnecessary data storage.
We use Microsoft cloud servers to store our data, reducing emissions by up to 98% compared to traditional on-site solutions².
Website
Our site uses minimal animation, and includes no video-player to limit data transferred.
We are limiting the number of back-up sites that we have, and ensuring that content on our site is streamlined.
Paper & print
We only print paper where necessary, using FSC certified paper if available.
Procurement
We have procurement criteria and thresholds for use in our company environment policy.
Customers
We include sustainability commitments in our proposals and the offer of an estimated carbon footprint on our project work.
² The carbon benefits of cloud computing (2018)
