This article originally appeared in the Channel Race to Zero report.
Scope 3 emissions make up more than 90% of Logicalis’ total emissions. They’re notoriously difficult to tackle because so much of it is linked to the supply chain. But the good news is, there are some categories of Scope 3 that organisations like ours can measure and tackle – and one of those is business travel.
An essential step is getting executive buy-in. When I pitched it to our Global CEO Bob Bailkoski, who is very supportive of what we’re trying to achieve through our sustainability strategy, he was really keen.
I then had the mandate to take it to the regional CEOs and thanks to senior backing everybody adopted it last year. Adoption at that executive level meant it was filtered down to the right people. And then it was set, we now have a sustainable travel policy, not just for travel but also accommodation.
A lot of the feedback was positive but many wanted a tool to help make better choices.
That’s when we trialled the RouteZero [travel sustainability] app. We met RouteZero CEO Dan Brown who presented it to us, and Bob was happy to try it out. Instead of flying from London to Cologne, he used the app to determine the most carbon-efficient route. We were able to capture the carbon savings he made from taking the train instead of flying and saw that this could be something we could use in conjunction with our travel policy. And so we decided to pilot it with our group team based in the UK.
With Covid and lockdown easing up, we’ve had more travel by the group team, with the number of journeys up 23% in our baseline, but our emissions over our baseline are down 26% – and we haven’t broken our financial budget. We’re now looking at rolling it out into all of our other regions.
We’ll have a better indication of the effect the travel policy has had with Route Zero in the next few weeks but, certainly, using it in our pilot group has proven fruitful.
Charissa Jaganath
Charissa Jaganath is Head of Responsible Business at Logicalis
