There’s no easy one-size-fits-all calculation to come up with a carbon emissions figure for your company’s waste. In order to come up with a final carbon emissions total, you need to know your waste streams, the weight of each stream, and what happens to it after it’s been collected from your site.
And that’s where Kenny Waste Management’s online portal comes in. From now on, our customers will be able to access their carbon emissions figures on their online account. When you access your account on our portal, you can now see live information about your ongoing emissions.
How are carbon emissions calculated?
The government uses a set of conversion factors for all UK businesses. Emissions vary between different waste streams and different methods of waste management. In its simplest terms, “activity factors” (such as distance travelled, fuel used, and tonnes of waste) are converted into a carbon emissions value.
For re-used and recycled waste, only the distance travelled to the reclamation centre is used (any further emissions caused by the recycling process come under different headings, not waste management. For landfill, transport plus landfill emissions need to be calculated – so the greater the amount of waste sent to landfill, the higher an organisation’s carbon emission score. As a Kenny Waste Management customer, you can rest assured that this figure will be extremely low or even non-existent for you!
What will you see on your online account?
We have developed our online reporting dashboard to give a quick snapshot visual on how your business is performing for your waste management requirements.
We have also focused these figures to now include the CO2 emissions from waste processing that you are saving working with us to help manage your waste in the most effective way.
As a country, we’ve committed to reduce our carbon emissions by at least 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. These targets can only be met with the cooperation of all businesses (and indeed, all of us as individual consumers), and most organisations set their own carbon emissions targets.
When you know your carbon footprint, you can look at ways of reducing it. In waste management, for example, this could be by setting a target to become a zero landfill organisation. You can also take measures to offset your carbon footprint. This can be as simple as taking part in a tree planting scheme, like we do ourselves.
Trees absorb CO2 and breathe out oxygen. A tree can absorb up to 22kg of carbon every year, and a group of six mature trees will sequester around 1 tonne of carbon. When you know what your carbon emissions figure is, it’s an easy calculation to work out how many trees are needed. At Kenny Waste Management, we work with our local Woodland Trust to offset the emissions from the transport side of our operation.
To find out more about how Kenny Waste Management will work with you to help you meet carbon emissions targets, please get in touch.
