It's no secret that we are passionate about the environment. That's why we chose to be beekeepers really. Our tiny bees work hard transporting pollen around the forests, aiding in pollination and creating a product that is not only good for people, but delicious too. Since we started this business we have been really aware of our environmental impact, but we knew that we needed to start measuring our carbon emissions. So this month we made it official by joining Toitū and doing our first carbon emission assessment.
This process let us create our own assessment by inputing our annual revenue and then the emissions created while creating that revenue, such as fuel, travel, waste and transport. Here is how we scored for our last financial year -
As you can see from the report, fuel is our major area of concern, and while we were surprised at how high we sat compared to the sector (agriculture) average, we knew that this would be the big one for us. Our fuel use is high for two reasons - we have to travel most days to get to our hives and the kind of vehicle that we need to use to access them is not particularly economical, but until there are better, affordable electric alternatives, we are a bit stuck on this one. There are of course things that we can do to lower our fuel use, and this leads nicely to the next part of our journey - making a plan!
The next step for us is to work out how we can reduce our emissions, and then have our reports verified to work towards off-setting our remaining emissions.
As a small business with relatively low revenue, this also impacts on our report as it is measured in kg of CO2 emitted per $1000 of revenue. We also hold a lot of product, rather than liquidating on a quick turn around like some food producers so this does impact on the report.
We are excited to make a. start, commit and work hard towards making our footprint lighter and lighter.
