In 2022 we began the innovative mission to track our company's carbon emissions, in real time. As a registered B Corp, carbon transparency is one of several impact areas that a business can choose to focus on. While many B Corp’s choose to collect this information as an annual audit, inputting this single data set for a B Corp application, we decided to use the B Corp application process as an opportunity to implement a real time emissions tracking programme, allowing us to see live data from Climpsons three key locations - our Leyton roastery, Broadway Market cafe and HQ and training academy in London Fields.
This real time monitoring allows the whole Climpsons team to see the impact our business has on the planet on a daily basis. We see a daily spike as the roaster is turned on at the crack of dawn and notice the impact of seasonal changes as our heating emissions increase in cooler months. We are able to see which coffees customers are choosing to drink most often (flat white, by the way) and how this choice can affect our overall emissions. This makes thinking about emissions integral to everything we do, with sustainable practice not something to consider once a year, but woven into the daily fabric of our operation.
This is an industry first. To our knowledge, no other specialty coffee businesses are collecting data on a granular level in this way. (If you are a specialty business working on your own real time emissions programme, do get in touch, we would love to find out how it’s working for you!)
Introducing, Ecofye
We couldn’t do this alone. Learning to read and understand carbon emissions is akin to learning a new language, with its unique terminology, systems and processes. This is why we employed the help of expert carbon emissions trackers Tiago and Daniela at Ecofye.
Ecofye are fluent in the language of emissions tracking, with an incredible record of accuracy behind them. Typically, the average margin of error reported in carbon emissions reporting is 40% (!!!) while the results of tracking with Ecofye sits at just 2%. In a practice where the detail is everything, the importance of accurate data cannot be overstated.
Our programme has been set up, using tailored metrics that are bespoke to the world of specialty coffee - allowing us to track daily total emissions, CO2 per KG of coffee roasted and average emissions per cup consumed from our Broadway Market location. Data is gathered from our roasting tracking systems, our smart energy monitors and from the till in our cafe monitoring sales through the day. With a wide reaching business model that operates in both the retail and wholesale sectors, this versatility in our reporting system was essential.
Let’s talk about Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions …
Carbon emissions can be categorised into three key areas, Scope 1, 2 and 3. This categorisation system was established by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a global standardised framework to support businesses calculating their greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s highlight the difference between these three categories.
Scope 1: These emissions are considered ‘direct emissions’ coming from our owned or controlled sources. For us at Climpsons, this includes our central heating, gas boiler and, most crucially in our work as roasters, the emissions directly associated with the roasting of the coffee.
Scope 2: These emissions are ‘indirect emissions’, meaning they come from the generation of purchased energy. We do not own the grid itself, but rather we purchase energy from it. We could consider these emissions as our overall energy usage.
Scope 3: This constitutes all indirect emissions. This could be considered as our ‘Value Chain Emissions’ taking into account the wider impact of our supply chain. These emissions are not directly managed by us, but they do impact our overall output. This is typically where most of a businesses emissions will fall and, for us, takes up a chunky 97% of our total footprint. Scope 3 emissions include the impact of coffee growing and potential associated deforestation as well as international transport of goods, all the materials required for production and any business travel. When we consider travel in particular, this includes the footprint of our employees travelling to work, the site visits of our account management team, as well as our occasional longer trips to visit our partners at origin across the coffee growing world.
Scope 3 emissions represent the power of choice we have as a business. It is within our business decision making to choose to work with producers who are prioritising the best environmental practice, implementing biodiversity projects to combat the negative impact of deforestation associated with coffee production. It is also within our choice to create a culture around our business of minimising emissions where possible. We provide a bicycle courier delivery service to wholesale customers within a postcode radius and currently over half of our coffee is delivered on two wheels. We also choose to work with packaging suppliers with excellent environmental credentials - our coffee cups are sourced from fellow B Corp and plant based Decent Packaging and our coffee bags are recyclable.
Often, a carbon footprint assessment will only include Scope 1 and 2 emissions, not taking into account the wider impact of indirect emissions within the greater supply chain.
“Until recently, most companies have focused on measuring emissions from their own operations and electricity consumption. But what about all of the emissions a company is responsible for outside of its own walls—from the goods it purchases to the disposal of the products it sells? In fact, the majority of total corporate emissions come from Scope 3 sources, which means many companies have been missing out on significant opportunities for improvement.” Greenhouse Gas Protocol on Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard.
Here, we see the dangers of greenwashing (“where companies make false or misleading statements about their environmental credentials, whether unintentionally or as a deliberate marketing strategy” according to Forbes). Failing to include Scope 3 emissions in carbon reporting leads to a false footprint, one that takes into account very little of the actual impact of production, cultivation, transport and packaging involved in selling any food and beverage product. This can lead to carbon offsetting and carbon neutrality claims that are far from the truth.
Climpsons Carbon Emissions in 2023
We recently met with Tiago from Ecofye who talked us through the process and shared insights on the results over the last year.
Of our total emissions, 97% fall into the category of Scope 3. Within this, 94% of total emissions are from product materials, ie. the coffee itself.
Of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, heating accounts for only 0.1% of total emissions and roasting accounts for 1.6%. This percentage breakdown has remained roughly the same since we began our carbon tracking programme two years ago.
When we consider a year of emissions, in 2023 we produced around 1000 tonnes of carbon. This is equivalent to 973 round trips from London to New York. Interestingly, the coffee industry globally contributes to a whopping 45 million tonnes of carbon emissions.
Our real time emissions project also tracks the average emissions per cup of coffee from our Broadway Market cafe, giving us daily data on which drinks on our menu are having the biggest and smallest carbon impact. On the day of writing, 47% of our cafe emissions from the last 7 days came from the humble flat white. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it’s by far the most popular coffee option with our customers and secondly, it has a large milk content, containing approximately 130 ml of milk, plus a small amount that is lost in wastage with each cup. The average emissions for a cup of coffee from our cafe currently sits at 314g of CO2.
When we’re talking about coffee emissions in a cafe context, we need to talk about milk. The emissions per cup data we are collecting takes into account our roughly 50/50 split of dairy and oat milk.
A recent study by Hubbub showed that on average plant milks generate 68% fewer emissions than dairy, and oat milks, like Oatly that we offer at our location, generate 71% fewer emissions than dairy. Obviously, there are exceptions here and not all alternative milks are made the same (this is a much bigger topic than we have time to dig into here!) but the evidence is clear that milk plays a huge role in the carbon emissions in your cup, with a switch to non-dairy proving an easy win to instantly reduce carbon impact.
This data also allows us to see which drinks have the lowest carbon impact. Here, we see that even though batch brews and cold brews are some of our most popular orders, they produce a very small percentage of our overall carbon emissions. In the last 7 days, both batch brews and cold brews have accounted for just 2% of our overall carbon output. Much of this is due to the high energy usage of an espresso machine.
In our Broadway Market cafe we make espresso using a La Marzocco KB90 three group machine. As a company, La Marzocco pride themselves in sustainable innovation and incorporate boiler insulation, eco mode and temperature control systems on all their new machines, however even with these innovative features, the impact of simply making espresso is still far greater than brewing a batch. For espresso, water is constantly heated to temperature precision and released at pressure to brew coffee at the press of a button. This means, when switched on, the machine is constantly using energy, even if a coffee is presently being brewed. There is also a significant energy usage associated with milk steaming and purging to clean between shots and steams (although we combat some of this with an external Uber milk steamer). For batch brew, water is heated for just 5 minutes in order to produce at least 15 cups of coffee. You’ll find even lower emissions still in our simple and trusted hand cold brew immersion method, where no water is heated at all.
We have also been collecting real time data on emissions per kilo of coffee roasted, showing a current figure of 191g of CO2 per kilo of coffee. This shows overall less emissions for a 1000g of coffee than for an espresso based drink, using just 18g of beans. Buying coffee to brew at home using low emission brew methods (this could be a V60 pour over or an immersion method like the innovative clever dripper) can have a big impact on the carbon footprint of your coffee drinking routine.
Again, we come back to the impact of decision making. From this emissions tracking project we can see three simple changes to reduce a personal coffee carbon footprint.
1. Swap dairy for an alternative milk
- Mix up espresso based coffee for batch brew or cold brew
- Switch the coffee shop for a hand brewed coffee at home
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Select your coffee carefully
A consideration with our data set
It’s worth noting that much of the initial data gathered here is based on standard carbon factors and a global average when it comes to emissions associated with coffee production. However, the coffee partners we choose to work with are all making steps towards sustainability at source, investing in biodiversity and reforestation projects alongside coffee production. This means our individual impact might be much lower than suggested here, as well as differing from one coffee to the next due to varied conditions of production.
Over 50% of the coffee we roast is sourced from Daterra in Brazil (currently, The Baron and The Fields). Sustainability champions, they are a carbon negative coffee farm and therefore have no carbon footprint. In our reporting, one of the next stages is to start to gather more granular data, accounting for the more carbon favourable conditions of production with the producers we work with. For example, the coffee from carbon negative Daterra, is carbon neutral and therefore offset however, currently, our carbon footprint is calculated in gross and does not factor this extra information in.
The next steps …
Collecting this real time data is just the start. The next step is to look at this information to seek ways to improve our sustainable business practices.
Step forward, Climpsons Sustainability Taskforce. We’ve gathered representatives from each department in our business - from the roastery to our cafe team, from training and account management to our marketing and events teams - to assess the role each of our teams can play in decision making to reduce our carbon impact. We’re working on small shifts and long-term changes that won’t change the standout quality of our coffee output, covering everything from wastage in our training processes to researching alternative milk offerings. This is a way of building a sustainable mindset into the fabric of our business and harnessing the power of a collective ambition for change.
We’re looking forward to sharing more on our projects and changes in the coming months.
