Carbon Reduction Plan

Carbon Reduction Plan

Supplier name: Qodea Limited (Formerly known as Cloud Technology Solutions Ltd) & Cloud Technology Solutions Limited t/a CloudM
Publication date: 30th August 2024
Period Covered: 1st April 2023- 30th March 2024

We’re committed to achieving Net Zero

At Qodea & CloudM, we’ve always pushed ourselves to do more for the world around us – it’s one of the reasons we are a B Corp. The focus areas and benchmarks outlined by B Corp act as our moral compass always encouraging us to “do right” in everything we do.

As such, we’re now creating our roadmap to net zero emissions by 2030.

Our baseline emissions footprint:

Baseline emissions are a record of the GHGs that have been produced in the past and were produced prior to the introduction of any strategies to reduce emissions. Baseline emissions are the reference point against which emissions reduction can be measured. The reporting year is the financial year 2024 and the baseline year is the financial year 2022.

We note that due to the COVID-19 pandemic falling in our baseline year, business travel had reduced. As expected, coming out of the pandemic, we have seen an increase this year in certain areas, however, due to some large changes in building management and our policies, we have made some significant reductions in other areas.

Current Emissions Reporting:

Scope 1 – Owned emissions (Facilities, Vehicles)

We do not own any facilities, however, we have included improvements to be made in partnership with our building suppliers in our roadmap. With regards to vehicles, the company does not own, or use, any vehicles at this point.

Scope 2 – Indirect emissions (Energy)

We are accountable for energy in only one of our offices (our Manchester-based Headquarters). The combined emissions for electricity in this office over our Fiscal Year 2024 was 3,914.00 Co2 KG.

Scope 3 – Supply chain emissions

4. Upstream transportation & distribution

We do not own the transportation or distribution of any goods sold. Most of our services are software and cloud infrastructure related and therefore have no requirement for transport. However, we do also work with Chrome suppliers to service our clients. Whilst we don’t have control over those suppliers' processes, we have recently improved our procurement processes to include environmental and social impact.

5. Waste generated in operations

As a remote-first business, our employees work from a variety of locations, meaning that we are unable to calculate the general waste from each home location. On that basis, we’ve used the waste from our office locations in this section.

The waste for our Manchester office is handled by Bruntwood and B&M Waste Services, who are proud not to send any waste to landfill unless legally required to do so. Waste is either recycled and converted into new materials, or sent to an energy-from-waste plant to create energy. During FY24, Bruntwood reported a total of 26,711 kg of waste collected for the Bloc building, of which our share was 3.2% or 854.75 kg. This equates to 18.19 kg Co2, using the GHG conversion factors for 2024.

Our London office during FY24 was managed by Work.Life, and as published in their sustainability report, in FY24 the average waste generated per sq ft was 0.77kg. Our occupancy is 365.3 sq ft, which gives us a share of 281.28 kg of waste for the year. Work.Life stipulates in their report that 65% of this waste is recycled, so we assume the worst-case scenario, that the rest goes to landfill. This equates to 55.12 kg Co2.

For our Edinburgh office, we have limited information about the waste generated in the building overall, and the recycling percentages; we do however know that our occupancy was 267 sq ft, and we assume the same waste amount per sq ft as the London office, which equates to 267 kg of waste. We calculate based on the worst case scenario of all this going to landfill, rather than being recycled, which amounts to 138.93 kg Co2 emissions.

Finally, we have also allowed for 1 ton of packaging waste such as boxes from deliveries, most of which is highly recyclable.

Aside from general waste, we also produce electronic waste due to the requirement for sufficient desk setups for our employees. We dispose of electronic waste in two ways; repurposing (reusing internally or donating to local facilities charities, schools, etc.), and recycling using ICT Reverse. ICT reverse provides a detailed breakdown of what was re-used, recycled or destroyed.

Our total waste emissions were 247.17 Co2e(kg)

6. Business travel

Our employees use three main modes of transport for business travel (train, plane, and car). We have used our internal data from our Trainline.com business account, our travel consultants’ flight booking records and petrol expenses for car travel. The emissions for all business travel were 120.71 Co2e(t).

7. Employee commuting

Our employees work on a remote-first contract and therefore have no requirement to commute. However, some employees do choose to commute on a regular basis. We have asked our employees to complete a survey of how often they travel for work, the distance and how they travel. The total emissions for employee commuting have been calculated to be 10,670 Co2e(kg).

9. Downstream transportation and distribution

We do not own the transportation or distribution of any goods sold. Most of our services are software and cloud infrastructure related and therefore have no requirement for transport. However, we do also work with Chrome suppliers to service our clients. Whilst we don’t have control over those suppliers' processes, our roadmap includes an extension of procurement processes to include environmental and social impact.

This resulted in total estimated emissions of 149.73 Co2e(t).

Comparison summary;

This year:

• Our indirect emissions have reduced significantly this year - by around 17 Co2e(tonnes) and 24 Co2e(tonnes) vs our baseline year, this is largely due to the increase of renewable energy in our electricity usage. We also sold one of our larger office spaces as it was under-utilised, this helped to reduce energy consumption.

• Whilst our Business travel has increased since our baseline year, our baseline year was during COVID19 when people could not travel. Our emissions from business travel last year were 241.70 Co2e(tonnes), so we have improved on last year by over 90 Co2e(tonnes). This is primarily because CloudM closed some of their international offices therefore less aeroplane travel is required, but we have also made a conscious effort to encourage more rail travel and reduce short-haul flights.

• Our waste emissions have reduced by over 1.3 Co2e(tonnes). We had already reduced our waste emissions significantly vs baseline, by ensuring that we are following the correct recycling protocols and working with offices who have good recycling processes in place. This year our recycling has increased, alongside this our ability to report on recycling in other offices has improved.

Our goals

We have very recently merged with another business and we are working on other acquisition opportunities. Therefore our goals for the next 12 months include properly benchmarking the emissions for those businesses and improving our ability to track and monitor our emissions in real time and at scale. We will be looking for a partnership to assist us with this goal and help us to set realistic targets across the business(es) as we scale.

We also want to gather data on more scope 3 emissions, such as employees working from home, purchases and the impact of our project work via Google.

We also aim to reduce our scope 2 and 3 emissions further by working closely with our building management.

The Journey to Net Zero

What’s next

Scope 1

Whilst we don’t have ownership over any of our premises we’re committed to partnering with our providers to improve their impact. We’re currently working with Bruntwood, our headquarters’ property owner, on piloting IoT control kits to manage our space for energy consumption. Following our testing, the successful components of this pilot will be rolled out to the wider Bruntwood portfolio of offices.

Scope 2

We have made huge strides in reducing our footprint in this area by moving to renewable energy and ensuring our offices are the right size for our usage. We will continue to be committed to increasing renewable energy and working with office management companies who are also committed to increasing renewable energy.

Scope 3

Purchased goods & services

In 2023 we launched our new procurement assessment, this includes social and environmental reviews and will be used to make decisions on suppliers of goods and services. We are committed to assessing our current service providers and hardware suppliers (laptops, monitors, mobile phones), as well as all suppliers procured during that year.

Transportation & distribution

Per the above explanation, we are also committing to assessing all hardware distributors used to supply our clients in year 1.

General waste

Whilst general waste is not our largest source of emissions, it is also a challenge to reduce as materials used by our employees will continually depreciate. However, we are committed to working with office management companies that prioritise quality recycling. And we will continue to improve our electronic waste recycling schemes.

Business travel

Whilst we will continue to leverage our systems to allow people to collaborate remotely, we acknowledge we are unable to eradicate travel entirely. However, we will continue to encourage train journeys through our Trainline business account, making it easier for employees to book trains without having to claim expenses.

We understand that this approach does still create carbon emissions, and therefore commit to offsetting all business travel using an internally approved Gold standard offsetting partner. In the longer term, we will consider the use of electric vehicles for business travel.

Commuting

Similarly to business travel, we are unable to eradicate all emissions for commutes, though we commit to continuing our remote-first policy to ensure no unnecessary commuting. Because of this, we plan to continue our Carbon Offset Commutes policy creating innovative ways of engaging our people in its use.

In the longer term, we plan on using the data collected from our commute submissions to create data-driven incentives to encourage the use of electric vehicles and public transport over the use of higher-emission vehicles.

Declaration and Sign Off

This Carbon Reduction Plan has been completed in accordance with PPN 06/21 and associated guidance and reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans.

Emissions have been reported and recorded in accordance with the published reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans and the GHG Reporting Protocol corporate standard and uses the appropriate Government emission conversion factors for greenhouse gas company reporting.

Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions have been reported in accordance with SECR requirements, and the required subset of Scope 3 emissions have been reported in accordance with the published reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans and the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard.

This Carbon Reduction Plan has been reviewed and signed off by the board of directors.

Signed by Bill Bates, Director

Last updated: August 2024