Here’s how Investors in the Environment (iiE) introduced the SmartCarbon Calculator to the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in order to establish a carbon footprint and identify areas of the organisation where carbon impacts could be reduced.
Founded in 1871, the IET is a registered charity and one of the world’s largest professional engineering institutions with 154,000 members throughout 148 countries around the world. The organisation’s purpose is to engineer a better world; enabling the engineering and research community to develop innovative solutions to society’s biggest challenges.
Like all industries, the engineering and technology sector finds itself wrestling with the challenge of implementing carbon reduction strategies in order to meet its environmental responsibilities. As an organisation geared towards supporting engineers and technicians in achieving and maintaining professional standards and competency, the IET has taken steps to understand its carbon emissions.
As Head of Distribution and Facilities for the IET, Richard Mundy, explains,
“We have always been proactive towards our environmental responsibility, both in our offices and through using our position in the global community to influence innovation and best practice through our members and volunteers.
“We know engineers have skills, insights and ingenuity to help provide solutions and we believe it is our shared responsibility to reduce the impact we have on our environment. So, in 2020, we launched the “IET strategy 2030” aiming for us to be managing our sustainability performance as a company as well as assisting engineering and technology research communities to solve world problems.”
This ambitious commitment led the IET team to engage with Investors in the Environment (iiE), the not-for-profit sustainability accreditation scheme designed to help organisations and bodies to take action, track progress and work towards accreditation in the process. Richard comments,
“We first engaged with the Investors in the Environment programme in 2020 as a way of progressing our journey by giving us knowledge to achieve our ultimate goal. We particularly needed support around measurement best practice including how best to analyse our environmental data to help us identify and prioritise changes we could make.
“As a not-for-profit organisation, iiE is a perfect partner aligning with our own principles and desire to benefit humanity. The iiE accreditation is a nationally registered standard provided by an organisation recognised for upholding environmental standard, which allows us to benchmark our efforts to our goals and track our progress against a respected industry standard.”
Since those early days in 2020, Richard suggests that the IET has already made good progress towards its goal of achieving carbon neutrality and has passed a number of key milestones over the course of the last five years:
“Before starting our journey with iiE in 2020, we simply did what we thought was right. With their guidance we have progressed through Bronze to Silver stage. We have questioned what, how and why we tackle environmental and sustainability issues.
“The move from our own thoughts to Bronze to Silver has showcased our progress in a measurable way against a given structure. Our targets have become more meaningful and stretch us to make a difference both internally in our own buildings with colleagues and how we push out environmental knowledge Internationally.”
An essential tool in measuring, monitoring and reporting on carbon emissions throughout this process has been the SmartCarbon Calculator, which was first introduced to the IET by the team at iiE as a solution to save time and resource. Richard says,
“The SmartCarbon Calculator has provided us with a measurement tool that is easy to use and offers simple and obvious navigation. It has allowed us to record and document our usage and calculate emissions, all in one place.
“It offers straight-forward, useful reports and dashboards that allow us to study, explore and, where needed, investigate our usage and emissions. It’s provided us the opportunity to centralise all usage and emissions in one easy and accessible place.
“The platform is directly used by a small team who look after sustainability within our organisation. This group of colleagues gather, collect and collate usage from the wider team at the IET. The data and information that we gain from the platform is distributed back out through those teams but also gives us the basis for important communication updates to our wider internal audience.”
More broadly, Richard explains that the SmartCarbon Calculator has enabled the IET to gain critical insights into its own performance and that of its suppliers:
“It has provided us with a greater understanding of the carbon-intensive and demanding areas of what we do and how we do it. Knowing where our carbon emissions currently are means we can focus our sustainability efforts and strategies to these areas, reducing our emissions and helping us to achieve our Net Zero objectives and goals.”
“The SmartCarbon Calculator has been particularly useful in showing us trends and patterns in our data, both from a dashboard glance or from the data reports. We’ve found both the year-on-year comparison dashboard a great tool to showcase how we are doing overall and the ease in which to add new streams of measurement within the scopes is really convenient.”
“The IET has made impressive sustainability performance improvements over the past few years. It effectively twins its use of the iiE programme with the SmartCarbon platform to measure and manage its carbon emissions and wider environmental impacts,” says Antony Gough, National Lead of the Investors in the Environment programme. “This has helped to maximise the benefit of the significant retrofit of its Futures Place building in Stevenage and the upgrade of Savoy Place in London to create exemplary low-carbon workplaces.”
Asked what achieving an environmental accreditation from iiE means for an organisation like the IET, Richard concludes, “Our iiE accreditation shows, to the wider community, the IET’s commitment to environmental responsibility. Attaining the silver level accreditation and that we are aiming for the green level and to achieve Net Zero shows our colleagues, suppliers and customers that we are continually aiming to improve and reduce our carbon footprint.“Potential suppliers know they have to prove their sustainability commitments before we will partner with them, and we use iiE accreditation as a key selling point with our customers.”
Using the SmartCarbon platform alongside the Investors in the Environment (iiE) accreditation programme provides organisations of any size and from any sector to get to grips with reducing their environmental impact, with a particular emphasis on measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions. Get started with SmartCarbon or contact iiE today.