How to make your company more sustainable

Stink Studios has recently examined and reported on its carbon emissions, and is pledging to make changes to how the company works as a result. Here group managing director James Britton explains the process and offers some advice

If you work for a creative business, what’s the biggest impact you have on the environment? Is it the energy and materials that you use to run your studio space? Or perhaps travelling to see clients, or your team commuting to work? Or is it the digital processing required to produce the work itself, or storing the ever-increasing archive of source materials and assets in the cloud?

At the start of the year we asked ourselves this question and had no honest idea of the answer. None of us want to be part of the unchecked system that continues to contribute to the climate crisis, but the standards by which carbon emissions are measured, reported and compared can make it hard to get your head around.

“Companies need better tools to help tackle their emissions,” says George Wade of Zevero, a fast growing startup which is developing a software platform to help companies measure, report and reduce their carbon impact. “Once companies understand where all their carbon emissions are coming from they can focus their time and effort on decarbonising the parts of their business with the biggest impact,” says Wade.

At Stink Studios, we’re working with Zevero to measure and report all of our annual GHG emissions from our operations in London (based on pre-pandemic data). The report, which is published online, has given us lots of valuable insight. What became clear was that, while we only produce a small fraction of the emissions of some other companies from industries that create physical products, there’s lots of areas we can improve and reduce our ongoing impact on the environment.