Sustainability for Everyone

Sustainability requirements from customers and legislative bodies are growing exponentially, but the topic increasingly becomes more complicated and detail-oriented, making it difficult for companies to respond effectively. Fundamentally, sustainability requires detailed documentation to lend credibility to claims and demonstrate progress in initiatives. Carbon footprinting and emissions disclosures are becoming increasingly important in organizational success.

Much like calculating taxes, emissions calculations have requirements that only someone well-versed in sustainability, and often also in math, physics and chemistry, can successfully and efficiently document. Even though the GHG Protocol is the global standard for emissions calculations, it is not the only standard and there are many nuances in methods for calculations and data output formats. The average company doesn’t have sustainability staff on hand or can’t respond to the unprecedented rate of change in emissions documentation. Even those with sustainably focused higher education degrees are left in the dust unless they are actively working on the cutting edge of sustainability development.

At EcoScapes™ Sustainability Solutions, LLC, we make it our job to stay ahead of sustainability trends and legislation. We are focused on creating tools to simplify the documentation process for organizations, regardless of how complicated the actual calculations may be. Smaller companies, especially, don’t have deep pockets to hire a sustainability consultant to handle their needs and even those that do often find they need custom solutions to meet their customer and/or legislative requirements. While EcoScapes Sustainability Solutions, LLC can and does provide custom solutions for sustainability needs, our goal is to help organizations be able to do more with fewer resources.

EcoScapes™ Solve, the first tool to launch, was created to minimize the need for custom solutions and to eliminate the need for a sustainability expert to produce emissions data. It translates data inputs from almost any format into formats needed for the GHG Protocol and carries out the calculations. Currently, it calculates scope 1 and 2 emissions but is being expanded to include scope 3 emissions in the coming months. The intent is for scope 3 to be available one year prior to California’s upcoming legislative requirement, which will impact nearly every business in the United States.

Through a simple and secure online survey, EcoScapes™ Solve requests basic information including waste, utility and maintenance data, straight from invoices. Its flexibility allows for reporting in any units you choose. The aim is to keep data input as easy as possible. For example, waste can be reported in pounds, cubic feet or even as simple as the number of 96-gallon trash cans filled per month. Then, data is converted behind the scenes into a variety of outputs for all kinds of sustainability reporting ranging from formal methods like CDP, EcoVadis, and GRI to simple presentations for an organization’s customers.
EcoScapes™ Solve produces a user-friendly report, including data outputs in various formats and usable graphs/charts to display emissions breakdowns and sustainability target progress. Additionally, data outputs from EcoScapes™ Solve show how an organization is performing over time as a whole and by location. Both are useful tools for organizations looking to set sustainability targets and track progress over time.

Emissions reports not only help identify what an organization’s environmental impact is, but also identify where they can have the biggest impact on their carbon footprint and where the easier opportunities are to reduce emissions.

Staying ahead of the curve in emissions calculations and carbon footprinting is something many sustainability companies do, but we pride ourselves in making the process user-friendly and affordable for everyone. I wake up each day, excited to work on the next iteration of tools for our customers.