Epimorphics & Our Carbon Footprint

Epimorphics Ltd is committed to adopting good sustainability practices. We recognise that, through our business activities and operations, we inevitably have environmental, social and economic impacts. Therefore, wherever practical and consistent with our business goals, we aim throughout our business activities to maximise our positive and minimise our negative sustainable development related impacts and thereby promote a more sustainable future.

Our principles

• Epimorphics is aware that sustainability is important and is committed to adopting sustainable business practises
  
• Sustainability impacts will be considered in all business decisions
  
• Practical steps and policies will be developed and used to guide day to day operations and other business decisions in all relevant areas of our activities
  
• Measurable sustainability goals will be defined, reported to shareholders and reviewed

As part of meeting and adopting good sustainability practises we have been reviewing and monitoring our business carbon footprint in more detail, alongside our broader environment and sustainability policy commitments.

It is widely accepted by scientists that global warming is being heavily influenced by the actions of humans and that urgent action needs to be taken.

Here at Epimorphics, we firmly believe that, as a company, we have a responsibility to assess and proactively plan to reduce and manage our emissions as much as possible. Under current regulations we are not legally required to report our Greenhouse Gas emissions as set out by the UK government’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) policy but we are fully committed to doing as much as we can and playing our part in the wider effort.

Here, we set out a brief outline of the things that we have already set into motion and those that are planned as we move forward.

Please follow the links if you would like to see more in depth information.

Goals

The goal of corporate carbon footprint assessments is to quantify, as far as possible, the GHG (Greenhouse) emissions associated with the operations of an organisation.

GHG emissions, may be direct emissions, (e.g. from burning fossil fuels on site or in corporately owned vehicles) or indirect emissions (e.g. through the use of electricity on corporate premises, business travel, purchasing of goods and services and the use of products or services by customers).

The footprinting process involves creating an inventory of the GHG emissions of an organisation and its activities. There are many ways that could be used to estimate the GHG emissions associated with these associated activities. For that reason there are standards defined for how organisations should prepare and calculate a corporate-level GHG emissions inventory (footprint).

OUR FOOTPRINT (October 2020 – September 2021)

Overview

For our 2021 / 2022 financial year the verified total emissions for scope 1, 2 footprint is and core 3 footprint (homeworking, business travel, employee commuting and scope 3 energy emissions) was approx. 11.44 tCO2e (location-based) and 10.75 tCO2e (market-based). In addition we estimated our supply chain emissions in line with the UK SECR (Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting) methodologies. The combined total is 52.7 tCO2e (location-based), which is likely to be an overestimate due to known carbon reductions by some parts of the supply chain.  Our 2021 / 2022 financial year data was independently verified by Carbon Footprint Ltd.

For our previous year, 2020/21, we choose to offset the amount including our estimated supply chain emissions to make sure that we were offsetting beyond our emissions. We where therefore certified as Carbon Neutral Plus (until March 2023). To do that we had decided to offset through an accredited scheme, choosing a scheme that supports the planting of trees in the UK, in particular in the South West and Wales. The project mainly plants in school locations, helping to educate children and support wildlife habitats whilst sequestering carbon emissions. For each 1 tCO2e offset, one tree is planted in the UK and an additional 1 tCO2e is offset through a VCS Tree Buddying project to guarantee the emission reductions.

Comparisons to previous year

For a comparison with our footprint for 2020/21 and our reflections on the process of footprinting see our blog post.

Corporate sustainability management

We assess, manage our environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk and compliance, and manage our corporate sustainability goals using the Ecovadis platform. We will be reporting our carbon footprint data for 2023 to CDP Climate via the SME process.

Epimorphics is committed to completing Science Based Targets initiative (‘SBTi’) streamlined route for SMEs process of setting Near-term science-based targets over our 23/24 financial year.