Tibor Kalman once said ‘Good clients are much smarter than you’ – and we couldn’t agree more. One of the great pleasures of our work is that we are constantly learning from our clients about incredible new subjects: everything from foraging to distilling to garden design to carbon calculation.

As we embarked on our work with Two Drifters we were immediately struck by the extreme rigour of their carbon usage analysis and subsequent work to offset this. Powered by his background in the sciences, Russ at Two Drifter’s work and advocacy of carbon capture pioneers Climeworks convinced us to think about how we might do the same.

Climeworks is one the most established Direct Air Capture hopes. Put simply, they aim to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, remineralise it and bury it. Harnessing the abundance of renewable energy in Iceland, they have set up a large-scale prototype of this technology and are developing ambitious plans to roll that out to other parts of the world where renewable energy can power this work.

With this new benchmark firmly established in our imagination, we took it upon ourselves to consider all of the different impacts of our own work: from our energy usage to the carbon footprint of digital tools.

The work to determine this accurately is now underway, but it will take time for us to be able to assert confidently that we are able to measure Scope 3 impacts. So, the immediate challenge was where to begin.

We chose to start with an exploration of our carbon impact within historical energy usage. From our energy supplier, the percentage of renewably generated energy had gradually risen over the last five years and by 2022 all of our energy was renewable – but the historical shortfall (the amount of energy we used from non-renewable sources) was easily quantifiable.

Using all this information we were able to calculate the carbon weight of this shortfall and then work with Climeworks to offset it. So far we have paid to remove 21 tonnes of Co2 with them.

Having looked at different forms of offsetting, we believe this approach has the potential to make a significant impact. In the short term, this certificate acts as an investment in the development of their technologies and ultimately leads to the capture and storage of the carbon associated with our non renewable energy use.

We’re not alone in the growing belief of this approach, but fully recognise that it can only work alongside strategies to reduce carbon output. So, looking ahead we will continue to find ways to calculate and reduce the carbon cost of our work.

https://climeworks.com/

https://twodriftersrum.com/