As a scaling data tech company, Talking Medicines are keen to ensure that we continue to grow, evolve, and adapt to the challenges and opportunities presented by the Climate Challenge. We believe that transparency and openly sharing our carbon journey not only holds us to account to our stakeholders and ourselves, but creates a valuable space for discussion, growth, and challenge.
That’s why today, we are delighted to share with you our Carbon Footprint Certificate for 2021, produced in association with @Greenly a global green-tech company based in Paris. Talking Medicines chose to partner with Greenly as a highly respected B Corp organisation who use annual accounting data to calculate company carbon footprints. This creates a trackable, independent view of our endeavours to consciously address and benchmark our carbon impact, as we scale both here and in the United States.
Our overall production of 3.7t / employee placed Talking Medicines amongst the top 5 percentile performance of more than 1000 companies that Greenly support. Data analysis showed that 63% of our carbon footprint was created through ‘Scope 3’ activities – purchases and services obtained through suppliers, whilst around 28% was generated through combined digital, assets and energy requirements.
This knowledge enabled us to reach out to our top Suppliers by revenue and engage with them meaningfully about our and their carbon ambition, ensuring that there was alignment to progress towards net zero in a sustainable way that genuinely supported growth. Through this process we also humbly acknowledged any tactical limitations in our capacity to act now, but which should not be forgotten as the company evolves.
But where we could act, we did. Amongst many actions we performed an analysis of our asset (mainly tech) acquirement and disposal routes and reached out to our energy suppliers to ensure that where possible we were utilising low/no carbon energy resources.
It is exciting for us at Talking Medicines that we are fully supported by our board and stakeholders in our drive to Net Zero. This truly is a cross-functional team effort, and it would not have been possible to make this progress to date without our Sustainability Officer Stewart McKee, our other ESG officers Ellie Halliday and Olivia Lane, and the enthusiastic team behind @patientmetrx. With that support Talking Medicines were able to offset our carbon emissions for 2021 through Community led projects here in Scotland (www.scotlandbigpicture.com) and in New York State (https://fingerlakesclimatefund.org).
We are already progressing calculations for 2022 and addressing any challenges going forwards is paramount. Through this iterative process we will build a deeper knowledge of ourselves, and our opportunities to reduce our carbon impact as we grow.
We would like to acknowledge the friendly support, insight, and knowledge of our account manager at Greenly, ThibaultMannant.
If anyone would like any further information about our Carbon Assessment or our wider plans around ESG, please do drop me a line.
ScottCrae Founder, ESG & Impact, Talking Medicines.