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Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active

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Business Carbon Emissions Footprint Reporting Breakthrough

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See Through Carbon’s prototype page for a revolutionary open access public database that accurately measures business emissions for free

World’s First Publicly Visible Corporate Carbon Footprint

See Through Carbon kicks 2025 off with a landmark prototype for its revolutionary public carbon footprint database.

This mockup image, still to be connected to STC’s interrogatable public database, contains real-world data from a real business. It’s the first public manifestation of See Through Carbon’s revolutionary Accurate, Free, Open-source, Transparent public database for corporate carbon emissions.

This dashboard image is designed to be self-explanatory when fulling implemented. This article includes the missing ‘explainer boxes’ and other currently missing interactive features, and outlines the other levels of detail and explanation that lie below this dashboard level.

The Carbon Report

This is the ‘explainer box’ that will appear when you hover your cursor above the ‘Carbon Report’ section at the top of the dashboard. Text:

This See Through Carbon Carbon Report, conducted by See Through Carbon, offers an in-depth, accurate analysis of Eden Country Care’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The report provides transparency on the company’s environmental impact by evaluating key areas such as transportation, energy consumption on its premises and in its daily operations, and its supply chain.

Combined with other public reports from similar businesses, this report highlights the main emissions sources within other businesses of comparable scope, scale and locale.

These insights allow the company to pinpoint opportunities for carbon reduction, aligning their services with sustainable practices, complying with government regulation, and contributing to broader climate initiatives.

Compliance

This is the ‘explainer box’ that will appear when you hover your cursor above the ‘Compliance’ area of the dashboard. Text:

Governments and institutions require businesses to submit carbon reports to meet their decarbonisation goals.

Their reporting requirements are increasingly stringent and specific. The more accurate and detailed the data, the better it demonstrates compliance, and the more useful it is to identify the most effective areas for decarbonising any given sector, locale or size of business.

As a UK company operating in the Health Care sector, Eden Country Care is required to submit carbon reports conforming to National Health Service and UK Public Sector requirements.

The data collected and published by See Through Carbon and the methodologies used to calculate Eden Country Care’s carbon footprint are transparent and auditable by default, exceeding current requirements.

Methodology

This is the ‘explainer box’ that will appear when you hover your cursor above the ‘Methodology’ area of the dashboard. Text:

Nearly all human activity generates carbon emissions, often via complex processes and chains of interconnected entities. This complexity makes perfectly accurate emissions measurement an aspiration, rather than a realistic goal,.

Still, scientists and policymakers have developed widely-agreed standards to measure the physics of fossil fuel combustion. New research constantly refines, progresses and innovates these standards.

Accurate, reliable, meaningful data depends on consistently applying the best available science. See Through Carbon’s principles of radical transparency make our published methodologies open to constant public scrutiny, crowdsourcing quality control.

STC’s Board of Trustees, advised by our expert Advisory Panel, constantly review, and publish, the methodologies we use, based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, but also incorporating Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) where deemed appropriate.

Customer & Supplier STC take-up

This is the ‘explainer box’ that will appear when you hover your cursor above the ‘Customer & Supplier STC take-up’’ area of the dashboard. Text:

All businesses have customers and suppliers, making them part of longer supply chains. A business’s carbon footprint includes all the emissions that would not have been emitted had that business not existed, i.e. including its share of all the emissions generated by its suppliers, and those emitted by its customers at the end of the product’s life cycle. 

The more accurately these ‘Scope 3’ emissions are calculated, the more reliable, accurate, meaningful and useful the data. Without detailed calculations based on real-world data from individual suppliers and customers, calculating Scope 3 emissions required estimates, using the amount of money transacted as a proxy for actual emissions. 

The green ring segments represent the data from suppliers and customers who are also in the STC database (i.e. accurately measured using the same methodology). Grey segments are the proportion of data estimated using current best practice.

Footprint

This is the ‘explainer box’ that will appear when you hover your cursor above the ‘Footprint’ panel of the dashboard. Text:

The standard way of analysing the carbon footprint of any entity, whether an individual, business, institution or nation, is to divide its emissions into three categories.

SCOPE 1: ‘Direct Emissions’. These are what are commonly understood to be our ‘carbon footprint’, e.g. the emissions generated by the activities of a household, within a factory, on office premises, or at an event.

SCOPE 2: ‘Indirect Emissions’ from energy required for Scope 1 activities. Operating a machine may require the same amount of electricity, for example, but the emissions from rooftop solar panels would be much less than emissions from a coal-powered station.

SCOPE 3: Everything else. The entity’s share of all the emissions not included in Scopes 1 and 2. There are 15 sub-categories, but examples include the embedded energy in steel components, or emissions when products are disposed of at the end of their life.

Solutions

This is the ‘explainer box’ that will appear when you hover your cursor above the ‘Solutions’’ panel of the dashboard. Text:

For the Pilot phase, See Through Carbon is offering selected participants free basic carbon reduction advice, expressed as 3 Solutions with estimated CO2 savings, in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over a year.

Based on the data collected and specialist sector knowledge and experience, STC’s consultants suggest 3 Solutions. Each is a discreet action that, if implemented, would reduce total emissions by approximately 1) 50%+, 2) 25%, 3) 10%.

STC’s pool of carbon consultants volunteer their expertise pro bono. STC only offers this option to small businesses who could not otherwise afford specialist consultancy.

These Solutions may be used to train an AI to automatically generate good-enough advice at scale. Given the task’s complexity and limited data available, bespoke advice from professional consultants will always be better. STC’s volunteer experts’ contact details available on our website.

Emissions

This is the ‘explainer box’ that will appear when you hover your cursor above the ‘Emissions’ panel of the dashboard.

First Adopter Profile

Eden Country Care (ECC) is the first business to participate in See Through Carbon’s Pilot, and to provide real-world data for the prototype dashboard.

As a company with fewer than 250 employees, ECC could have applied for Pilot 1: SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises). As it’s part of the UK’s health sector, it qualifies for Pilot 4: Health  (STC’s rationale for having a separate pilot for Health explained in detail here).

ECC has private clients who pay from their own pockets, but like most of the UK’s health and social care businesses, much of its funding also ultimately derives from the public purse, via the National Health Service, or local government social service budgets. 

Based in rural Cumbria, northwest England, ECC is a family-owned business operating from five offices, delivering home care to elderly or disabled clients.

It employs around 100 full-time and part-time staff. Nearly all employees work outside the offices, driving from client to client to deliver personal care in their client’s homes. 

First Adopter Notes

Like most Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), ECC lacks the capital to purchase its own fleet of vehicles. This means employees use their own vehicles and charge the company a standard rate for the number of work-related miles they drive.

The nature of ECC’s business explains the lopsided look of their particular carbon footprint pie chart. One category – employee transport – accounts for 93% of the business’s total carbon footprint. In other words, nearly all their carbon footprint comes from the exhaust pipes of their employees’ cars.

It’s instructive to understand why this falls under Scope 3 and not – as many might assume – Scope 1, as ECC is an excellent illustration of why accurately counting all emissions, including Scope 3, is so important.  Consider:

  • If ECC had only reported Scopes 1 and 2, they would have missed 93% of their actual footprint.
  • Technically, reporting transport emissions under Scope 1 or Scope 3 depends only on the legal owners of the cars. It makes zero difference to global heating, which obeys the laws of atmospheric physics, not carbon accounting.
  • Technically, ‘commuting’ (i.e. employees driving to the five offices to work there) comes under Scope ‘Business travel’ (i.e. employees driving to visit clients) comes under Scope 3. Again, ‘carbon don’t care’.
  • EV’s emissions are not zero. Even if you charge them using certified renewable energy suppliers, there’s embedded energy in the generation and transmission costs.
  • The methodology behind conversion factor calculations are neither straightforward nor standard. Adopting a Well To Tank (WTT) approach, for example, can add 20% to the total emissions figure. ‘Accuracy’ in carbon accounting is often in the eye of the beholder, and more or an art than science, but the key is transparency so anyone can challenge and scrutinise the figures.
  • Generic conversion factors reduces the incentive to reduce emissions. The less specific the factor, the less incentive anyone in the supply chain including them has to change their behaviour in order to see a measurable reduction of their emissions footprint. For energy, for example, most standards apply a national conversion factor based on the IEA’s annual list of calculations, which reflect the national energy mix, i.e. a country which derives most of its energy from coal, like India, will have a much higher conversion factor per kilowatt-hour that one that derives a lot of energy from renewable sources, like Iceland. Applying the same conversion factor across the board, especially in a fossil-fuel hungry country, means a business that uses solar-generated energy would register the same emissions as one that uses the same amount generated from oil.

These are just a few examples of the kind of methodological decisions that See Through Carbon’s Trustees have to make regarding how to measure carbon footprints,  just arising from one particular health service business in Cumbria.

The complexity of these decisions, and the rapid advancement of  more sophisticated, granular and detailed standards, makes it particularly important to make all methodologies available for public scrutiny, and not hidden inside a proprietorial IP black box.

Details on See Through Carbon, carbon accounting basics, and outlines of each of the seven Pilots can be found on the See Through Carbon website, including instructions on how to apply to participate in the Pilot, can be found on the See Through Carbon website.

First Adopter Response

Several months elapsed between ECC’s application to participate in the Pilot, and the publication of their bespoke dashboard above.

This was because STC wanted to use real-world data to develop and test key Pilot components, including:

  • Data collection form: an Excel spreadsheet, as STC discovered most companies are more familiar with, and comfortable with using this ubiquitous office software than downloading an unfamiliar STC app.
  • IT: recruiting and coordinating a team of volunteer coders and IT specialists with the right skills to develop the Pilot’s infrastructure and website.
  • Process: recruiting and training volunteer administrators to manage the application process troubleshoot, and respond to participant queries.
  • Experts: recruiting and training volunteer carbon accountants to check the data and carbon consultants to analyse Solutions.

Heather Tarney owns and runs ECC along with her brother Dan. Both have been patient, testing various versions of STC’s data collection form, and providing additional information or clarification when requested by STC’s team of carbon experts.  

Dan was responsible for filling out the data collection form, which he estimates took ‘about one hour’. STC’s IT team has incorporated many of his suggestions on streamlining  streamline the data collection process into our current form.

Heather initiated and coordinated ECC’s application to the Pilot. Here is her unedited response to seeing her business’s carbon footprint:

Seeing our carbon report for the first time was both eye opening and incredibly useful. It’s impressive to have such a clear and interactive breakdown of our emissions and actionable steps to reduce them. At Eden Country Care we’re always striving to improve, and this tool provides a practical way for us to make meaningful changes that benefit both the environment and our operations. 

By adopting solutions like transitioning to electric vehicles or reducing mileage, we can work towards lowering our carbon footprint while continuing to deliver excellent care to our clients. 

This initiative also allows us to show our customers and suppliers that sustainability is a key focus for us, encouraging others to take similar steps. 

The See Through Carbon project is an excellent example of how innovation can simplify sustainability efforts.

It’s a powerful tool that will help businesses like ours make measurable improvements and I’m excited to see the positive impact it will have on Eden Country Care and the wider community.

STC Chair of Trustees Response

Robert Stern is See Through Carbon’s Chair of Trustees and Founding COO.  After founding See Through News in 2021 with the Goal of ‘Speeding up Darbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active, he realised that commercial imperatives result in carbon accounting industry and standards being unable to measure business emissions at scale. 

As management requires measurement, Robert reasoned that if commercial accounting is systemically Inaccurate, Costly, Opaque and Proprietary (ICOP), the solution should be a public carbon reporting ecosystem that’s Accurate, Free to use, Open-source and Transparent (AFOT). 

The ‘scramble for compliance’ precipitated by mandatory reporting schemes like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) means the need for such an ecosystem, and a public database, is more pressing than ever. Here is his response to the publication of Eden Country Care’s prototype business emissions dashboard.

This dashboard image may appear simple, but it’s been a very long time in the making, Heather first expressed interest in participating in the Pilot in March 2023, 6 months after we soft-launched the website describing the project. 

Heather and Dan have been so supportive and patient over the 10 months it’s taken us to generate this dashboard. The actual footprint data is not the problem – that’s basic arithmetic. All you need to do is collect the right numbers, look up the best available conversion factors, multiply them and tot up the total.

The difficulty was in translating our global-level ambition into the very specific needs of a Cumbrian home care provider, to provide the basis for a sustainable, scalable, pragmatic service, creating a template that could ultimately be accessible to any business with an internet connections, wherever it’s situated, whatever it does, in any language, and however large or small it may be.

We established See Through Carbon because it was a gaping, and increasingly large void, that no one else had yet filled. New reporting regulation has driven the current carbon accounting Gold Rush, with venture capital funds backing hundreds of tech-driven platforms, nearly all AI-driven, to disrupt and dominate what has already become a trillion-dollar carbon trading industry.

But while these new entrants, and longer-standing carbon consultancies, accountants and auditors can offer a wide range of very useful services, which AI is very good at integrating, we’re all learning that AI is only as good at the quantity and quality of the data it’s trained on. 

Unfortunately, just when we need it most, market forces and the profit motive have not produced what’s required: a publicly-available database of consistently tagged, well-taxonomised real-world dataset. That’s why the solution has to be STC’s ecosystem that benefits everyone, not another commercial competitor.

The See Through network may be uniquely equipped to design this ecosystem. The fact that we operate on a budget of zero appears counterintuitive to people accustomed to money-based solutions, but so far so good. Our network of pro bono experts, in fields ranging from carbon accounting, to IT, AI, graphic design, digital marketing, advertising and old-school storytelling, have proved that not everyone is solely motivated by money all the time. 

STC’s sibling programmes, See Through News (journalism and outreach), See Through Games (online games) and See Through Together (video content) have developed and proved See Through’s ‘transparent Trojan Horse’ methodology over 4 years now.  All four programmes are expanding exponentially, and this STC prototype is an important milestone is staring to integrate all their different functions. 

Whether we need a knowledge graph database architect, a web designer, a carbon consultant, or a willing Participant like Eden Country Care, we seem to be able to find someone prepared to volunteer goods or services for free – we’ve even been given half a million dollars worth of supercomputer-grade cloud computing without even asking for it!

When all the news seems bad and cynicism abounds, it’s easy to lose faith in human nature, so it’s a rare pleasure to find there are still so many people prepared to contribute their time and effort motivated only by measurable carbon reduction.