Our Ongoing Commitment to Carbon Neutrality

evolve’s mission to advance sustainable systems and solutions for people, processes, and places has driven us to achieve and maintain carbon neutral operations since 2011. Our commitment to ongoing improvement led us to begin measuring our emissions starting with the 2009 base year, with the goal of becoming and remaining a carbon neutral company. This year, we analyzed our 2012 emissions and benchmarked this against our 2009 report to track changes and revisit our efforts.
Flip through our presentation to see the comparison and understand what we’ve done:

How Did We Do?

We assessed all of our energy usage – from travel, electricity, and heating to water usage. Compared to 2009, our operations resulted in slightly more total GHGs, but less per-person.
Business travel and employee commuting were our largest categories for emissions. We were able to reduce our business air travel by 37%, but making some of those trips by car caused our emissions in that category to increase. We also saw a significant increase in emissions from employee commuting, because our staff has grown and because some of us have moved farther away from the office.

How Can We Improve?

 
We continue to take a strategic approach to reducing our emissions, focusing on reducing our energy usage, transportation miles, and waste production first, buying in-state electricity made from wind energy, and offsetting that which we can’t reduce through in-state programs. We have determined that special efforts to reduce emissions from travel should be a high priority. We can also further reduce our electricity use by unplugging printers and computers overnight.
As a small office, these simple reductions are already having a big impact on our emissions. For the emissions we continue to create, we’re purchasing Green-e Certified Wind Renewable Energy and offsetting other emissions with carbon offset purchases from CarbonFund.org.

 
You can check out our 2009 report here for more details on our ongoing efforts.

You Can Do It Too

Managing and reducing our carbon footprint, and environmental performance in general is a priority for evolve.  It is essential to measure that which you intend to manage. evolveEA can help your organization in measuring your current emissions, recommending and implementing reductions, and communicating your strategy to stakeholders, contact us to learn more.