Pacific Environments NZ Ltd is now a Toitū CarbonZero (cert TM) certified business, and we have started our Toitū CarbonZero journey.
After 9 months of gathering data during 2020, we quantified our CO2e emissions and offset them to become certified Carbon Zero. Offsetting emissions is only half the story, and we have pledged to reduce our total CO2e emissions by at least 20% by 2030.
A bit of background:
Toitū means to sustain continually. We prioritise continuous improvement in the journey to reduce our environmental impact and regenerate our environment.
Toitū also connects our actions with our outcomes. This is important to us as a company, as we ask ourselves and our clients to measure, manage and reduce our environmental impacts and carbon emissions, and disclose these results in a public forum.”
Pacific Environments came across Toitū at the Green Property Summit. Our sustainability team explored the program and decided to follow through with it. We invested time to understand the process and collect all the data – electricity, petrol use, air travel, City Hop usage, paper usage. Factors that contributed to our carbon footprint over the past year.
With Covid 19 lockdowns & the effect this had on naturally reducing our carbon emissions, we set a goal for a 20% reduction, rather than the Government’s 50%.
It will be interesting to see how the coming year stacks up, and how we can maintain actions to reduce emissions even further.
We have three next steps –
- To engage an electricity auditor and reduce our electricity use
- Maintain use of online meetings where practical
- Purchase an electric car when we need to replace our current hybrid work car
This is in addition to recycling as much as possible and separating our food scraps.
Becoming a Toitū certified organisation is just the beginning of the journey. From 2024, CO2e emissions will become part of the building code, and we will need to know what each new building’s carbon emissions will be.
Pacific Environments are well on the journey to becoming more aware of how we design and build.
What do you do to reduce your emissions? Any tips you can pass on?
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