Bristol-based start-up Spherics and Business West have launched a new venture to help support the businesses in the South West to better understand their carbon emissions impact and to drive positive changes for the environment.
In this short blog, we take a quick look at the partnership to better understand how small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) can take advantage of the offer.
Why is it important for SMEs to act?
Individually SMEs don’t have massive footprints, but as a collective, they make up 70% of all emissions across Europe. SMEs make up 99% of UK business and around 50% of GDP, so as a collective we are very powerful.
What are the first steps for an SME in tackling emissions?
Like with any decision in business, it’s far easier to make the best choices when you have all the information in front of you. You wouldn’t try to make saving cuts without a financial statement so you shouldn’t try and cut emissions without an accurate footprint.
“Time after time, we see businesses complete their carbon footprint and they are shocked to see the emissions hot-spots are not where they were expecting.”
Duncan Oswald - Head of Climate Science - Spherics
What is After Footprinting?
After Footprinting is the fun part. It involves sitting down as a business and working out where the low hanging fruit lies. There is often a large amount of it. From there, companies like Spherics, SME Climate Hub, Carbon Trust & FSB can offer SMEs guidance on making changes in problem areas.
The Spherics x Business West Partnership
Why is Business West partnering with Spherics?
Let's have Business West answer that one.
“From the work we’ve been doing since Cop26, businesses have been telling us they need a simple way of getting an understanding of their carbon impact. We felt that the Spherics proposition was the perfect solution for many of the SMEs within our network as it provides a benchmark measurement for their carbon footprint and we are proud to offer such a fantastic product to our members that is so affordable.”
James Monk - Commercial Director - Business West
Why is Spherics better than the other solutions?
If you are asking this question - nice work, most SMEs sadly don’t even get this far. To be honest, any steps you make, be that with an online carbon calculator or with a consultant is going to help.
Spherics - a thousand times cheaper than a Consultant
Put simply, the difference is cost. Sustainability consultants cost a lot of money, £2K+ per report, whereas Spherics cost as little as £9 per month, with real-time reporting.
Spherics - ten times more accurate than an online “Carbon Footprinting” tool
Online or spreadsheet footprinting software is very limited in terms of accuracy and can be very time-consuming. Like consultants, these tools require you to input data unlike Spherics, which is more or less automated.
Spherics automation - the key to the cost and time-saving software
Spherics software uses finance data that you already have. By syncing with your accounting data, Spherics can produce an accurate carbon footprint in seconds, the calculation is less than seconds. From there Spherics does need a little more information to increase the accuracy of the report, but within 45minutes and £9 later you have a Green House Gas Protocol (GHG) compliant report.
3 month free trial to Business West Chamber Members, 1 month free to non-members.
We are excited to announce that we are offering our Chamber Members 3 months of free use of Spherics. To learn more please visit our webpage with details of the offer.
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