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  5. Carbon emissions calculator methodology statement

Carbon emissions calculator methodology statement

6 minute read • Last updated: 25 February 2025

Trying to work out how your various energy, transport and waste emissions contribute to your carbon footprint can appear daunting and with this in mind, we have incorporated a calculator into your workbook.

Based on the information you provide, the calculator will measure your emissions and generate a personalised report that you can use on your climate action journey.

This guidance on how the calculator works aims to give you a better understanding of how to use it, it’s purpose and the conversation factors employed when calculating your carbon emissions.

In this article:

  • Using the the calculator
  • Transport
  • Energy and waste
  • Conversion factors

Using the the calculator

Our calculator allows users to estimate what their business carbon emissions were for a 12-month period each year.

The first year is intended to be retrospective. It should be used as a benchmark for the next years as a business takes carbon-reducing measures and works through its climate action plan.

New businesses without historical data can instead use the benchmark column for their first year of operation.

Water pouring down a waterfall located in a forest

Inversnaid Falls, Loch Lomond

Intended audience

The calculator has been designed to be as user-friendly as possible. It's primarily geared towards micro, small and medium businesses at an early stage of their climate journey. There is a balance between user experience and accuracy to allow a wide range of businesses to get an estimate of specific areas of their footprint in a straightforward way.

Testing and research

User testing and human research showed that businesses needed:

  • a simple-to-use calculator to get started
  • to learn to become accurate over a three-year period with the goal of getting started in mind

Purpose

The main intentions of the calculator are to:

  • embed good practices
  • provide users with a snapshot of their emissions over a four-year period (one benchmark year, plus three consecutive years)
  • estimate emissions and develop accuracy over time through knowledge and good practice
  • allow for carbon calculation to become more accessible to early-stage businesses

Workbook goals

By using the workbook, the intention is for businesses to:

  • attempt a start with measuring their supply and value chain
  • consider becoming more accurate independently of this calculator after three years
  • gain the confidence to move onto a more advanced calculating tool
  • start to understand and think of their emissions in relation to scopes one, two, and three on initiation and delivery of their actions over the years

Transport

The modes of transport on the calculator use UK government conversion factors. These include petrol and diesel passenger vehicles, planes, ferries, buses, taxis, trams, and trains.

  • Passenger vehicles

    Mileage by petrol and diesel passenger vehicles is taken from conversion factors drawn across a UK average of small, medium, and large categories. This let us draw an estimate and reduce the number of touchpoints for a user at an early stage of taking climate action to avoid confusion or feeling overwhelmed.

    Passenger vehicles that might be leased as part of scope three hires are the same as those for owned passenger vehicles by a company. So, we merged all under transport category for the purposes of this calculator. However, businesses will require to separate into scopes one and three at a more advanced stage of their journey / at a later date of their development.

    The factors considering biofuel blends are used to represent the main fuel form at standard forecourts. These are provided in litres for businesses who wish to do that instead of miles.

  • Ferries

    For the ferry category, we calculated:

    • the average distance travelled and duration for ferry routes within Scotland that are under 40 minutes long
    • the average distance travelled and duration for ferry routes within Scotland that are over 40 minutes long

    Our idea was that this would make the climate action workbook more user friendly for those just starting their climate journey.

    We used timetables from all ferry companies and their routes. We only used Google Maps to calculate distances of those routes where the data is not available directly from the ferry companies.

    The conversion factor used is the one averaging all foot and car passengers in the UK.

  • Flights

    For the breakdown of flights, we categorise domestic flights to include flights within the UK with a duration of an hour. Short-haul flights are defined as flights within Europe with a duration of three hours. Long-haul flights are flights to outside Europe with a duration of seven hours.

    The average passenger conversion factors in kilometres are used. We recognise that this gives users a limited range of inputs to give a rough approximation of flight emissions.

    All calculations are for a return journey.

Energy and waste

Energy

To calculate energy, we use data from the UK government's:

  • Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
  • Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy

This gives a breakdown for how much CO2e* is emitted for each source of energy. Where applicable, we use gross calorific value conversion factors which is the basis of most energy bills.

*We display the results of our carbon calculator in CO2e which stands for carbon dioxide equivalent. CO2 only measures carbon dioxide. CO2e, however, measures CO2 as well as other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide.

Waste

Waste conversion factors for the categories "landfill", "recycling", and "food waste" come from the conversion factors on gov.uk.

Conversion factors

Limitations to the conversion factors

When calculating the emissions for passenger vehicles, we based this on the average vehicle size declared in the conversion factors on gov.uk. This draws an average from small, medium and large sized passenger vehicles.

We chose not to categorise passenger vehicles by size or specific category to reduce the number of details users would be required to enter on the calculator at this early stage.

Similarly, for waste we chose not to include all the methods of disposal by type of waste to keep the input required by the user to a manageable level. Flight emission calculations are using very broad averages for this version.

The UK Government conversion factors provide much more granular data on flights taken, class of flight and haul. We chose to keep a simplified version for ease of use of the calculator that were informed by those same factors.

We will explore the possibility of adding further advanced breakdowns in a future version of the calculator.

Updates to the conversion factors

The government publishes conversion factors annually. We will update our carbon calculator workbook periodically with the latest information. As we make updated versions available on our website, we will also notify registered users.

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