Happy Earth Day 2022!
DreamingFish is a creative video agency producing video and animated content for a range of businesses around the world. Currently a team of 12, we have a small office in Woking and every year undertake a large number of shoots across the country and overseas. As a values-driven company, one of our core values is ‘we care’. With this in mind, we recognised we needed to do something to reduce our emissions. But, as a small business, where do you start? How do you begin the journey to net-zero?
We began by looking for a charity that plants trees that we could help support. There are few out there including: World Land Trust, Ecologi and Earthly, but we settled on Tree Aid. Tree Aid does more than just plant trees in Africa. They create sustainable communities, planting trees that can be eaten, provide shade, enhance the soil and provide a means of income. This approach strongly resonated with our values. So, we decided to support them by making a monthly donation as well as a one-off payment every time we sign a new client. This was an attempt to offset any emissions produced as a result of our work.
Our impact
But, just how much carbon do we actually produce? As a small business this can be difficult to measure. We had made the climate commitment on the SME Climate Hub website. Earlier this year, Normative released a carbon calculator (through the portal) which meant that for the first time there was a simple way for a small business to calculate their emissions. It took a few hours, and we needed our detailed accounts for last year, but for the first time we had a number, and with that a means to track our progress to net zero.
What was surprising was that scope 1 and 2 (direct and indirect) emissions were very low but could still be reduced. Our HQ is semi-serviced so we don’t have control over the choice of electricity provider. We are in discussions to change this so we can choose a greener provider. The office is also of wooden construction, making it cold in winter and hot in summer. This means we need to run heaters or cooling throughout the year so we are currently looking at alternative options for this…
Our journey
Air travel is also a major part of the emissions that we produce. It hasn’t been an issue over the last two years because of Covid but, we know that this year we’ll be back in the air again. As a result, we need to look at ways to address this. We have remote filming options and are looking to use local crews where possible, but sometimes nothing beats having a presence on the ground and that’s probably where we’ll have to fall back on offsetting.
What really shocked us was that 95% of our emissions were scope 3: emissions produced by our supply chain. We have little control over how our freelancers and other suppliers choose to act, but we can influence this by amending our contracts and choosing companies and individuals that have greener credentials.
We are still early in our journey but feel that achieving net-zero as a business (scope 1 and 2) is possible by 2025, and we will aim to reduce our scope 3 emissions to zero by 2030. It is difficult, but it’s certainly not as complicated as it may first seem, and by acting together we can all stop this crisis before it’s too late.
Phil and the DreamingFish team x
