🌱 Scope 3 Step by Step: Your overview of WRAP’s Courtauld 2030 Scope 3 Protocols, and Arbikie Distillery's Carbon Positive Spirits.

Featuring Arbikie Distillery, The Good Beer Co, Oatly, Mindful Chef and more...

Aug 30, 2022

Happy Tuesday!

This week we cover:

Your overview of WRAP’s Courtauld 2030 Scope 3 GHG Measurement and Reporting Protocols for Food and Drink.
Arbikie’s groundbreaking Nadar Collection: helping them become one of “the world’s most sustainable distilleries”.
In case you missed it: 🌱 From the ground up: Climate Farmers and Alter Eco reveal two different routes to supporting regenerative agriculture.

> Good News Last Week

🎯 Mindful Chef re-certified as a B Corp, increasing their score from 80 to 107. They are now in the top 3% of food companies globally.

🎯 The Good Beer Co and Sobah Beverages launched SobahGood Tropical Lager Coral’ation (TLC) beer. Their goal? To support the Coral Sea Foundation and launch their ‘Sea Women of the Great Barrier Reef’ program to train First Nations women in practical marine biology and science to support their work as leaders and Reef guardians in their local communities.

⭐️ Ben & Jerry’s partnered with Tony’s Chocoloney to launch 2 new chocolate bars and a new flavour of ice cream in a bid to help eliminate modern slavery and child labour from cocoa supply chains. Ben & Jerry’s will adopt Tony’s ‘Open Chain’ sourcing principles which are design to increase transparency.

⭐️ Wagamama transitioned to cPET, made from 30% recycled content and eliminating 330 tonnes of virgin plastics from total operations. The move has reduced the carbon footprint of their Katsu Curry dish by 62%.

⭐️ Burberry became the first luxury fashion brand to receive approval for net-zero emissions goal by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which includes a 95% reduction of scope 1 & 2 emissions by 2023 (from 2017 baseline) and a 46.2% reduction of scope 3 emissions by 2030 (from 2019 baseline).

⭐️ FatFace announced that their branded ‘Preloved Reloved’ store, in partnership with Thrift+, has seen 3,500 products recirculated and £14,080 raised for charity.

⭐️ Innocent announced the launch of their Farmer Innovation Fund to reduce the footprint of their ingredients, which make up 57% of their total carbon footprint. The fund awards research grants of up to £20,000 to support their suppliers’ assess to options and design projects that reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from growing innocent’s ingredients.

⭐️ Tea brand TAZO announced their ‘Regenerative Roadmap’, with 7 pillars to transition to regenerative and organic farming. TAZO is one of the largest brands owned by parent company ekaterra, which is responsible for 100 billion cups of tea annually and is itself the world’s largest tea company. Part of these 7 steps include committing to setting Science Based Targets, and joining 1% for the Planet.

⭐️ Domestos relaunched their range of bleach bottles with 50% recycled plastic, using high-quality recycled resin to ensure strength and durability.

⚡️ ASDA has followed other UK supermarkets like Morrisons in removing best before dates on almost 250 fresh product lines. The goal? To reduce food waste. Specialist greengrocers in over 250 stores have received training on ASDA’s fresh produce operation, including storage to maintain freshness and quality.

⚡️ Aldi and their milk supplier Muller announced their trial of clear milk bottle caps to increase the recyclability of their products. Other supermarkets, like Waitrose, have done similar.

> Click on each link to read more.

> Quick Take

Your overview of WRAP’s Courtauld 2030 Scope 3 GHG Measurement and Reporting Protocols for Food and Drink.

Working in Food & Drink, and looking to quantify your supply chain emissions? This week, we’re digging into WRAP’s Courtauld 2030 Scope 3 GHG Measurement and Reporting Protocols for Food and Drink. WRAP have developed a market-first methodology designed to accurately help food and businesses accurately measure and report their indirect (Scope 3) emissions. Produced in consultation with the food and drink sector as part of their Courtauld 2030 working groups, the methodology aims to help businesses not only meet their greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, but also (importantly) cut costs of measuring and managing emissions.

Reporting on scope 3 emissions can be a minefield: what to include, how to collect the data, how to report? This new methodology can help your business cut costs of measuring and managing emissions, potentially removing the need for external consultants, to ensure faster progression towards meeting your declared GHG targets.

Wait, what is scope 3 again?

Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions from operational activities not owned or controlled by the reporting organisation. These include upstream emissions and downstream emissions which occur throughout the value chain. For consumer goods companies, Scope 3 emissions are estimated to account for 85-95% of total GHG emissions on average - so, measuring and reporting on these emissions enables businesses to focus on the greatest GHG reduction opportunities too. Often described as ‘cradle-to-grave’, upstream and downstream emissions encompass all stages of a product’s life-cycle from raw materials, manufacture, transport, storage, sale, use and disposal. It’s extensive, and there are multiple steps needed.

*WRAP’s 9 steps needed for measuring and reporting scope 3 emissions. Source: The Protocol*

Steps 3 + 4: What should you include in scope 3 reporting?

WRAP has put together 15 categories of scope 3 emissions (see page 25), split into upstream and downstream emissions and cross referenced by industry (manufacture, retail, wholesale, foodservice and catering). Brands can also use their evaluator tool to generate a more specific overview of your business.

Steps 5 + 6: How should I collect scope 3 data?

Develop an initial screening inventory using two forms of data:

Activity data - quantity of each product or ingredient purchased (spend £ per item or by weight, volume or units).
WRAP’s data quality hierarchy for activity data
Embodied emission factors - values used to convert activity data into GHG emissions i.e. the amount of GHG emitted in the production of a given quantity of product or ingredient purchased. See DEFRA’s open sourced ‘indirect emissions from the supply chain’ database to help.

WRAP suggests working with spend data (£) to start, with the aim to identify at least 80% of emissions by weight or volume data, focussing on the most significant emissions sources first.

What’s comes after data collection?

Setting targets, choosing a base year, quantifying reduction efforts, tracking emissions, reporting and more. At Following the Footprints, we talk about: MEASURE, MITIGATE, MANAGE and COMMUNICATE as 4 key steps that brands should follow. WRAP’s Courtauld 2030 Scope 3 GHG Measurement and Reporting Protocols for Food and Drink encourages you to do the same.

Need inspiration? Read reports from Oatly and Jude’s to see how they have measured their scope 3 emissions and begun to reduce their environmental impact.

Like this newsletter? Share Following the Footprints with a friend:

Arbikie’s groundbreaking Nadar Collection: helping them become one of “the world’s most sustainable distilleries”.

Arbikie Distillery are aiming to embody an ideal: they’re a true single-estate, field to bottle operation, exemplifying regenerative agricultural methods and using an ancient cattle breed and distillation by-products to enrich and maintain farmland. They use solar energy, their own water, their own crops.

“The word ‘sustainable’ is not just a badge for us, it is the very essence of our field to bottle operation, and at the heart of our farming practices and distillery craft. For every decision we make, we consider the environmental impact and how we can do things better.”

Very impressive, however, Arbikie Distillery’s achievements shouldn’t be intimidating for brands earlier in their sustainability journeys. Instead, Arbikie is providing a blueprint for how focusing on innovating your base ingredients, investing in regenerative agriculture, and so working with nature rather than against it can be pivotal to your sustainability journey (and can also make international headlines). How? Meet the Nàdar Collection.

What’s so special about the Nàdar Collection?

Arbikie Master Distiller Kirsty Black distilled the world’s first climate-positive spirits as part of her PHD. The next year, in 2020, Nàdar Gin launched. Nàdar (meaning ‘nature’ in Gaelic) is a ‘climate positive’ spirit - and one that doesn’t rely on buying carbon offsets to become so. Instead, Nadar relies on the natural power of peas, its base crop. Peas are carbon-saving heroes for three main reasons:

Where most crops need nitrogen fertiliser, legumes like peas are able to use nitrogen in the air to meet their needs. Most plants can’t do this, but legumes have a unique symbiotic relationship with the bacteria that lives on their root nodules. Synthetic nitrogen has damaged our water, air, soil and even own health, so avoiding these fertilisers are foundational to regenerative agriculture.
Fermenting peas creates a by-product called pot ale, which can be used for animal feed or fertiliser and has a particularly high protein content too. Given that feed production is the second highest source of emissions for livestock, using a by-product instead is a huge win. All of the pot ale from Arbikie’s experimental batch has either gone to feed their cows or neighbouring cows.
Increasing the number of crops we plant is beneficial for our biodiversity and soil quality. Varying what we grow in any one field, and the range of plants grown in the UK, is a key part of boosting our regenerative agricultural practices, and helping the soil sequester carbon more rapidly. Legumes are a great, and often rare, addition to our ecosystem.

As a result, using peas saves more carbon than is produced. With carbon footprints of -1.54kg CO2e per 700ml bottle of gin and >1.53kg CO2e per 700ml bottle of vodka, to be exact. This is all capped off with a partnership with closed-loop premium drinks distributors ecoSPIRITS, ensuring Nàdar’s end-to-end impact is as low as it can be.

The inspiration brands can take from Arbikie Distillery is endless. For us, the key message is that unique, premium and importantly carbon saving products can be created from the most ‘simple’ of ingredients. Invest in your ingredients first, to save relying on third party offsets later. Ultimately, innovative products don’t have to rely on groundbreaking technology. They can simply harness the power of what the ground has always provided.

Shop the Arbikie Distillery:

Shop Arbikie Distillery

Kirsty Black and Professor Graeme Walker

> In case you missed it

🌱 From the ground up: Climate Farmers and Alter Eco reveal two different routes to supporting regenerative agriculture.