How to get your small/medium sized enterprise’s carbon footprint, plus advice on reducing it, for free

The Goal

See Through Carbon is a carbon reporting ecosystem designed to:

• Accurately measure carbon footprints and help reduce them
• Be universally available to any scale or type of carbon-emitting entity
• Be free at the point of use
• Help businesses comply with carbon reporting regulations
• Create a carbon reporting ecosystem to promote emissions reduction
• Build a public database to help carbon consultants, researchers, policy makers, and businesses reduce emissions

Accurate, Universal, Transparent and Open

Like a national tax code, STC publishes its methodology, dynamically updates and improves its rules, and consistently applies them to:

• any scale of entity (individual, small business, big business, multinational) 
• any business sector (manufacturing, services, agriculture, textiles, construction etc.) 

This is no simple task. Carbon reporting is currently primitive compared to financial reporting, for example:

• the conversion factors (think conventionally accepted tax standards) required to accurately calculate carbon footprints vary widely in quality, detail and precision over different sectors.
• There is no standardised basis for measuring footprints (think standards weights & measures, or tax codes)
• Different jurisdictions have different regulatory requirements for carbon reporting (think different regulatory standards in EU, US, Japan etc.).

To accommodate these different challenges, See Through Carbon is running a series of 7 Pilots, covering different sectors and scales. These Pilots will test its data collection, analysis and recommendation processes, to fine-tune its data collection form, public report format, and methodology before going to scale. 

The Pilots will inform the design of an automated database, accessible to any entity in any line of business anywhere, at any scale, to participate in, analyse or use for emissions reporting compliance.

Limited Numbers

For STC’s Pilot phase, every participant’s data will be analysed by STC’s global team of expert carbon accountants. While time-consuming, this human process is necessary to:

1. Guarantee high quality, granular, detailed data 
2. Provide a meaningfully bespoke List of Solutions 
3. Create a consistently tagged data training set for possible future automation

This makes our pool of human expert volunteers the major bottleneck in limiting the number of participants we can allow for each Pilot.

The exact number of participants per Pilot is therefore not fixed, as 

• Capacity: our team of volunteer carbon specialists is growing all the time
• Workflow: the amount of time each participant’s data takes to review will rapidly diminish with each iterations, but can’t be accurately predicted
• End Point: the point at which the volume of data will be statistically significant enough to end the Pilot phase will only emerge as we add participants

For these reasons, the number of Pilot participants is limited. 

See Through Carbon’s commitment to transparency requires it to make clear to any applicants:

• whether they’ll be included in the Pilot
• when their free calculation and List of Solutions will be available

Who can apply

Any SME within Pilot 1’s locale and scope is welcome to apply. 

STC adds each applicant to a waiting list, processing them on a first-come, first-served basis. The main determinant of how many Participants, and how quickly their applications are processed, is the capacity of our human carbon accounting expert team.

STC will indicate how long each applicant can expect to wait before STC sends the link to your carbon report page, one entry on STC’s public database.

How to apply

To register your interest, email pilot1.sme@seethroughcarbon.org

See Through Carbon will email you back the following:

1. your unique ID reference
2. a data entry form (currently an Excel spreadsheet, shortly a web app).
3. Your position on the waiting list
4. An indication of the current review period before receiving your carbon report and list of solutions

Please note:

• Data protection: The only data we collect relates to your business’s emissions-generating activity. STC neither asks for, nor collects, any personal or financial data.
• Transparency: your data will be public by default, like the financial statements you’re obliged to report to the government. The only exception is your lists of suppliers and customers. These are commercially sensitive, and remain confidential, but STC needs them in order to automatically calculate carbon footprints up and down the supply chain (e.g. to know how much of your carbon footprint to allocate to your customers, and how much of your suppliers’ footprints to allocate to yours).
• Follow-up: Note that you may receive additional emails from STC’s carbon experts with clarifications or queries regarding your initial data. 
• Evidence: STC does not require you to submit documentary evidence, like a financial auditor might. Our queries seek clarity regarding the basis or rationale behind the numbers you’ve entered, or check anomalous entries that might be due to, for example, a misplaced decimal point, or wrong unit. 

What Happens Next

When our experts are satisfied, STC will email you a link to your public page in the STC database. This will enable you to:

• Accurately and verifiably report your carbon footprint
• Submit standard forms (e.g. Carbon Reduction Plans, Corporate Sustainability Reports, ESG documentation) to third parties
• Document and publicly share any emissions reduction resulting from acting on our List of Solutions