Industry Voice: Six Steps to starting your company's Net Zero journey, by Jigsaw24 founder and director Roger Whittle

Thinking about decarbonising your business can be extremely daunting, but Jigsaw 24 founder and director, Roger Whittle has been there and done that. He shares some of his top tips that won’t necessarily break the bank but will set you on the right road.

1. Enthusiastically embrace the issue and get high level, ideally board/ownership level, multi-year approval with CAPEX and OPEX budget. By CAPEX I mean things that you have to buy and invest in as a one off, such as an improved lower carbon air conditioning system if your old one is running ragged. Also have an OPEX budget for day-to-day running costs. These do not need to be enormous but they should be agreed.

2. Nominate an internal sustainability champion - someone who is passionate, good at marketing and comms and really, really good on Excel! You can recruit a graduate or intern for a year to start with, or split the role between several of your team members.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for external help - look at places such as LinkedIn, talk to consultants, network in the industry and of course, look at CRN’s new sustainability platform.

4. Focus on measuring and reducing your carbon footprint from a baseline. It is no complex, but you have to measure it at the start otherwise you won’t get anywhere. So you have to get your baseline number right first. This is critical. Then you can measure progress against that.

5. Nail Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol Scopes 1 and 2 first - they may only be five per cent of the overall challenge as everybody knows Scope 3 is the biggest and trickiest. Once you have got your Scopes 1 and 2 measured, that’s a great first stage. Don’t get stressed - startt with easy wins - for example, haggle with your electricity provider. They will all claim they are renewable and use offsets, but make sure in fact that they are REGO (Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin) backed. If they are not REGO backed, run a mile!

6. Make a detailed plan and go for those smaller steps first. Ensure your strategy is practical with every day reality in mind. We have a huge poster-sized Jigsaw24 Tree with different categories on it, some of which I’ll share below:

• Office - do you have LED lighting? Reduce the number of printers, are all your sales and marketing operations digital or do you still produce brochures? Use Eco soaps in toilets, and eco cleaning products around the office. Do you have bagless vacuum cleaners for example? Hand dryers rather than paper? Or if you have paper, make sure it is recycled/recyclable. Also make sure windows are double or triple glazed and get an EPC rating on your building.
• Warehouse - we have barcode thermal printers - and we try and do as many paperless deliveries as we can. All our cardboard is 100% FSC certified and the only paper we use (if we have to put notes in the deliveries) is recycled. Our pallets are all made of recyclable wood and we have a rechargeable battery-powered forklift truck.
• Vegan/Vegetarian - Try and be vegan or vegetarian one day a week, or even just one day a month, we offer oatmilk in our fridges (doesn’t split with hot drinks) as well as regular cows milk. All our coffee is Fairtrade.
• Recycle - We recycle everything, and have a partnership with waste company Veolia. They give us management reports and commit to zero landfill.
• International deliveries - we use DHL because they are carbon neutral - there will be other companies as well, but we ensure that we don’t just rely on offsets.
• Electric Vehicles (EVs) - we have replaced our whole fleet with EVs via a salary sacrifice scheme with Octopus EV, and we had chargers installed. Grants were available towards these costs. Encourage your people to invest in EVs, but if they can’t afford to do that encourage them to car share, cycle to work or use public transport. We offer season ticket loans for public transport to help with costs.

Hopefully this will give you plenty of ideas on how to get started. It is a great adventure, huge fun and so worthwhile! Good luck!

This article is sponsored by Jigsaw24.