Carbon Neutral Message: FireText's Environmental Statement

It’s official. FireText is now a carbon neutral company! 🎉

We enlisted environmental experts at Tevi - led by the University of Exeter - to calculate the carbon emissions we produce as a company, and chose to offset our entire emissions every quarter. We account for everything - from the energy our data centres use, to the coffee pods we consume at our green Cornish HQ.

We’re also carbon negative

We’re not stopping at carbon neutral. Here at FireText, we’re now actively offsetting more emissions than we produce every quarter (by 150%), meaning we’re officially carbon-negative.

We’ll continue to do this by calculating our emissions from each quarter, and offset these using our accredited supplier, Carbon Footprint.

We’ve accounted for every emission, from commutes to coffees

FireText’s footprint as a company is small, but we wanted to be generous in our calculations. So we made sure we worked with Tevi to account for every single thing and more. This includes:

The emissions our suppliers produce

To make sure our carbon emission calculations were generous, we looked at the ‘worst-case scenario’. We chose to include the energy consumed and emissions produced by our suppliers (data centres and mobile networks), despite them having their own offsetting measures in place.

The emissions we produce as a company

With remote workers and a team local to our Cornish office, we’ve accounted for the impact of our local commutes, electrical equipment, coffee pods, and the footprint of the building we share with fellow businesses - from Cool Earth to Plan for Ecology.

We chose our Cornish HQ wisely. Tremough Innovation Centre is an environmentally-aware building, surrounded by greenery and built to a BREEAM standard. It features biomass boilers, electric vehicle charging, rainwater harvesting to save and reuse water, and bat boxes outside to encourage local ecology.

The carbon cost of a text message

To identify emissions associated with FireText, we have also accounted for the energy used to transmit a text message.

We worked with suppliers to understand their energy usage and chose to offset those emissions despite suppliers implementing their own carbon-saving measures. Research sourced by Professors at the University of Lancaster helped us to identify our emissions.

Our key environmental targets

Being a web-based platform, FireText has a tiny carbon footprint by nature. But we know we can always do better, so we’ve put some key carbon reduction targets in place.

Our key targets include:

  • To Influence the reduction of supply chains emissions by 50% by March 2025.

  • To Increase positive environmental awareness by committing to 6 hours of team litter-picking every year

  • To reduce business travel emissions by 50% by March 2025

  • To Increase carbon-saving measures in place In our shared offices, agreeing to one opportunity every quarter to March 2025

Scopes of emissions

We’ve summarised where we’re currently at in terms of our environmental impact. This includes our carbon emissions as identified under three scopes: direct emissions, indirect emissions from the generation of electricity, steam heating or cooling, and indirect emissions associated with FireText’s value chain.

Scope 1

A zero return, due to the fact that FireText doesn’t generate any direct emissions. For example, we have no boiler and no processing of materials or similar.

Scope 2

Scope 2 Emissions include electricity, gas and water usage. As we are based in a Tremough Innovation Centre, electricity and gas figures are based on the square footage of our offices. Water usage figures are based upon each employee using on average 50L per day. These figures do not include activities such as Rain Water Harvesting which is actively employed.

Scope 3

We have chosen to include Scope 3 Emissions as we wish to be as transparent and accurate around our carbon emissions as possible.

We have included Travel (both office commuting of staff and business travel), purchase/renewal of electrical equipment, and food/drinks waste.

We have also chosen to include the emissions of processing and sending text messages. Despite our chosen partners having a strong environmental ethos and actively working towards their own carbon offset measures, we've chosen to also offset our energy usage through these partners (e.g. Data Centres & Mobile Network usage). We want to take responsibility for both our own emissions and those directly related to our business.

Click here to view our PPN 06/21 Carbon Reduction Plan

Last reviewed Dec 2023