Measuring Your Carbon Footprint for EHS Compliance

March 16, 2023 Jason Sirois

In 2022, sustainability is part of most companies’ strategies, irrespective of their size or industry. Although a single-location family bakery and an oil refinery will have different approaches to sustainable operations, some aspects of a sustainable business are similar: choose paper over plastic, be conscious about the use of water or energy, and minimize the use of harsh chemicals….

The list quickly becomes very long and for some industries (food, oil and gas, transportation, or garment manufacturing) the objective of a truly sustainable business may seem unattainable. For example, reducing your carbon footprint is high on the Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) compliance agenda. However, where does a family bakery’s carbon footprint start and end and how is it different from an oil refinery’s carbon footprint? How does a business measure its carbon footprint for EHS compliance purposes?

Each Industry Needs its Own Sustainability and EHS Compliance Vocabulary

To understand this issue, industries have developed vocabularies to describe the impact of their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, also referred to as one’s carbon footprint. For example, the construction industry employs the term “embodied carbon”. This approach views a building’s environmental impact through the lens of the total carbon footprint of the materials used during construction and throughout the supply chain. The total lifecycle covers the extraction of materials, includes manufacturing, and continues all the way through to the landfill or recycling. The purpose of using the embodied carbon approach is to identify any gaps in understanding the total carbon footprint of a structure. This approach is also adaptable for EHS compliance purposes when the issue of reporting GHG is added to the issue of measuring GHG.

Such initiatives are already underway. For example, the Architects CAN! (Climate Action Network) in the UK campaigns for a new policy to regulate the amount of embodied carbon in new buildings. The measures proposed in the policy are building regulations, planning policies, and whole life-cycle carbon assessment support.

EHS-Related Regulations will Only Increase

As a society, we are learning to approach the measuring and reporting of carbon emissions in a systemic way. To optimize EHS compliance, industry-specific initiatives are likely to be harmonized with existing general guidelines, such as the ones outlined in the ISO 14064 family of standards. These standards are focused on the creation and maintenance of a “GHG inventory” based on overarching industry-agnostic principles and would apply equally to a family bakery, a new skyscraper, or an oil refinery. From the compliance risk assessment perspective, as methodologies improve, regulations will grow in numbers and specificity, adding complexity to the task of EHS compliance. Experts in the EHS compliance field will need to monitor the evolution in this area closely, as they will continue to be responsible for applying the ISO guidelines along with the regulations for their industry, location and type of activity.

Citation Manage™ Supports EHS Compliance Professionals

The Citation Manage™ platform is calibrated to source the regulations appropriate to your industry, location and type of business. Our team then guides your EHS compliance professional and colleagues through an applicability review process to ensure all interested parties are up to date on relevant regulations. Next, we interpret the regulations for your particular operation to identify action items you need to fulfil to be compliant. Any updates to the existing regulations or any new regulations are loaded into the system automatically so that tracking them is never on your to-do list. Lastly, tasks can be created in association with requirements, so that team members are notified when upcoming compliance items are due and then complete them within the platform. You can learn more about how Citation Manage™ works in this brochure.