If you're looking to calculate your business's carbon footprint, it's important to follow a few essential steps to ensure that your calculations are accurate and reliable. In this section, we'll provide a quick overview of the key steps involved in calculating your carbon footprint, so you can get started right away. Each of these steps is explained in significantly more detail in the guide linked below.

Here are the basic steps you need to follow to create your first GHG inventory

1. Set organizational and operational boundaries: In carbon accounting, setting boundaries refers to the process of defining which facilities are relevant, identifying the sources of GHG emissions within the organization, as well as the activities, products, and services that will be included in the inventory.
2. Map your organization's activities: Create a list of each source in use in your organization, and define at which facilities each is used. By the end of this exercise, you will have a checklist and data collection template for all the information to include in your carbon footprint or carbon accounting software.
3. Collect data: Work with the key internal and external stakeholders to collect all the relevant data points defined above.
4. Estimate to fill the gaps: Any data that cannot be collected should be estimated using reasonable, trusted methods. All work should be shown, and all calculations and supporting documentation should be retained for future reference.
5. Validate the full dataset: Double-check that the data you have collected and estimated is correct and complete. Ensure you have documentation to support every data point.
6. Select emission factors: Find representative emission factors from a trusted publishing authority (many mentioned below) and add them to your calculation sheet or carbon accounting software.
7. Calculate your emissions: Perform the emissions calculations in a carbon accounting tool like Breeze or in Excel, Google Sheets, or another spreadsheet.
8. Validate and share your final numbers!

Explore The Comprehensive Guide to Measuring Business GHG Emissions

This is an excerpt from the The Comprehensive Guide to Measuring Business GHG Emissions 🚀
For a full set of steps, instructions, activity data collection guidance, and more, explore the guide.

How Breeze simplifies carbon accounting

Breeze is designed to ensure the calculation of greenhouse gas emissions inventories is smooth and accurate. Our goal is to accelerate credible climate action by giving companies access to low-cost, high-quality, useful emissions data. Create your free account today!