E051 - Charlie Luxton from Charlie Luxton Design

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators Transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability.

So why do you think sustainability, environmentalism, and just understanding your impact is really important in this day and age? And do you see it a lot with your work and how you're What you're doing with your architecture?

Yeah. I mean, clearly we are facing an enormous pivotal moment in our relationship with the planet. You know, the species has been so successful that we're pushing it to a point where we are changing it potentially to a point where it's no longer suitable for us. So, you know, clearly there is an enormous agenda to do something about the way in which we operate. And that means fundamentally rewiring our economy and the way that we do business. I mean that in the widest possible terms, the way that we live, the way that we eat, the way that we travel. The way that we work, you know, and, you know, from our perspective, architecture, it's really hard to get definitive figures about this, but some analysis seems to suggest that when you look at the energy used within buildings and the energy used to make buildings, it's around 40, 42, 43% of the global CO2 emissions.

It's massive.

It's massive, right?

So, they're the actions that happen within buildings. So, it mightn't be specifically to do with architecture, but they are the things that as architects and building designers, we are in the conversation, in the room about. And so we, you know, the building industry has an enormous role to play in reshaping what we do.

Do your customers want to know their environmental footprints ongoing? So are there discussions and conversations had about, right, fine, you're going to design our house. What is our carbon footprint while we're running this building? No, no.

We talk about running costs. But we drive that conversation and we say to them, we think your heating bills will be this. You know, we've got houses where the heating, you know, the energy bills are sort of £150, £200 a year for everything.

Um, so in some respects they are, because they're intrinsically linked, we are talking about the same subject.

We are talking about the same subject, but it's not analyzed. It's not at the front of the conversation, you know? And I think that's a huge problem. You know, we need the tools To start having these conversations at a much earlier and a much more quantified way. There's a huge problem in building, I think called the performance gap, where we design a building to use a certain amount of energy and almost without fail, we miss it by 100% for housing, 200% for, I think, offices, 300% for schools and, you know, government buildings. So, you know, we've got massive problems in the industry. And I think until we start, you know, doing the numbers, we're not going to solve them.

And Compare Your Footprint helps that.

I think Compare Your Footprint is a really important tool to start getting people to get their house in order, because it's very easy to look at the wider economy and say, we're going to get to carbon net by 2050. We need to get X reduction by 2030, you know, all these numbers. But until you actually understand what you're doing, I don't see how you can really move forward. So I think it's crucial that we have these audits for companies. I think it should realistically, it should be law in my opinion, but you know, and I think it will be.

Well, and it is becoming—

with the new streamlined energy carbon reporting, you're now seeing companies of a certain size, roughly 250 people plus and £35 million turnover roughly, having to report on at least Scope 1 and 2 emissions. And we know that Scope 3 will be brought in in the near future. We designed Compay Footprint to work for us as a consultancy at Green Element because we realized that we cannot scale Green Element on using Excel spreadsheets. To give you a kind of rough rule of thumb, we had a large, large company come to us and talk about their carbon reporting, and they told us that it takes them 6 weeks door-to-door to report on their carbon footprint.

Every year?

Every year. They now— it now takes them 4 to 6 hours because of the ease of use of uploading all their data to managing it and the added benefit of being able to benchmark themselves against others within their own industry. And we—

So it started as an in-house kind of exercise and sort of grown.

Yeah.

And I think what we're finding people are really excited about is because we've designed it to help us, which we are actually then helping others. That's what people seem to be really excited about because we are not software designers designing something that we think will help people. Yeah. We are designing something that We know will help people because it's, we're already using it.

Yes. It started from, we need a tool cuz this is too slow. Yeah. And then actually it's so good that other people can do it themselves. So talk me through the process of taking my company, 8-person architecture practice, you know, what kind of information, what kind of data, what is that journey to getting a report?

So you would start to think about where you, what you want to do. So what do you want to report on? It obviously will be energy. And it will be if you own your vehicle. So you're saying you want to buy an electric vehicle, you'll want to report on that. So that's Scope 1 and 2 emissions. You'll also want to do your business travel. You'll also want to understand if you're buying lots of stationery. We talked about paper usage. If you are— any consumables that you're buying within your business.

I'm assuming coffee has quite a big carbon footprint because we get through a lot of coffee.

They don't have a carbon factor for coffee.

You're okay.

It might just get through.

It's actually It's under food spend. Right.

Which says it's just a generalized one on food spend.

Yeah. Which isn't great. But I think that as we become more intelligent with the way that we report on our carbon, we were talking about that before, about personal carbon reporting.

Yeah.

Then we're going to see more and more better leaps and we'll be able to include anything. So once you understand what it is that you want to report on, then you will either upload your data if you use a travel agent, or if you use a stationery company, they'll send you the Excel spreadsheet and the orders and you just upload them into our system, or you'll be able— or we'll download templates that we have designed and you just input that data and then upload it. So either way, we've made it as easy as possible for you to be able to understand your environmental footprint. And then you just press a button and you are benchmarked against people within your industry.

Okay.

So you understand how well you are doing and then you can sort of strive to improve upon that. How long do you think it would take for a company who have turnover sort of £600,000, £700,000 a year? What would you say?

How long is that likely to take?

It actually depends on how much information you have to hand.

So a lot of it is data gathering and a lot of it is— but because of where you are and who you are, you're going to have a very good grasp of your energy usage and your energy spend. So therefore you'll be able to put that in fairly quickly. Some businesses don't have such a good grasp on their data, so therefore they find it harder. And that's really the lengthy part of this whole process. What we have done that many organizations don't do is you can download it as a PDF. Brilliant. You download the report, but actually downloading it back into a Excel. So you can then manipulate that data to fit it to whatever you want it for. So you'll do your annual reporting, you will be writing your tenders, and you can then manipulate that data into fit whatever you want to do. And for the larger organizations who have to do CDP, who have to do all this tendering and reporting, it means then they have access to the information that they want in a format that they want.

Because as a small company, you know, the SMEs are, you in many ways you would say that, you know, the lifeblood of this country's economy, you know, it's where a lot of the business is done. And to have the potential to start to interrogate that and benchmark and try and improve, I think is crucial, you know, absolutely crucial so that you're not just relying on the larger 250 employees and above companies sort of doing the heavy lifting. Everyone needs to take responsibility. And I think that's the point of this challenge, isn't it? Yeah. You know, everyone's got to get involved or we're not going to get there.

And I think what Emma and I are really excited about is charging people according to their turnover.

Mm-hmm.

So, I mean, don't quote me on these figures, but say roughly £50,000 turnover, 50 quid. So it really helps those SMEs. They are then, they're not charging, charged £1,000 for a consultant to come in. They're literally paying next to nothing to understand that footprint.

Mm-hmm.

And that's really exciting because as you, 99% of all businesses in the UK are SMEs.

Mm-hmm.

That is massive. If we all know our footprint, can you imagine the ramifications and the lead-on that happens in our personal lives? If people in business are going, well, actually our 3-man band is this footprint, we should start looking at our home life.

We should start—

because the knock-on effect is really, really, really crucial.

How much do you see significant change in business activities having audited?

People will start to look at what it is they're buying, and by pure nature of bench being benchmarked against others, they will see themselves either in the middle or wherever they are. They will want to improve. So if they see their stationery is really high and their travel really low, then they'll go fine. Let's concentrate on the high stuff. But that will be continually changed because it's by pure nature of business and growth and shrinking and the way that businesses are. And I should say you're normalized as well. So you're not actually. Comparing CO2 actual to another company's, you're normalizing that data, which means that you are either by turnover. So it's per pound spent or per person employed or per foot squared or whatever. Isn't it sad? I mean, you've been, we've, I mean, we're, we've known each other for years and years and years. Isn't it sad that in 2019 we've designed a software that's going to help? It should have been designed in 2007, 2006.

Stop even having those thoughts. Because it just takes you nowhere. Yeah. Because you're I was just looking out there going, why are we doing any of this stuff this way? We shouldn't be doing it. And I was very, very depressed about it a year ago. My sense is things are now changing, that there feels like actually for the first time in 15 years, I actually feel hopeful.

Yeah.

So the fact that you're doing this is brilliant. The fact that we're looking at carbon emissions of our construction processes when we're designing is brilliant. The fact that this is happening and that's happening and there's community self-build happening in our industry and things are changing. And the Preston model and all these things that are happening is hugely exciting. I think we've come to a point in our journey with climate change that it is the responsibility of everyone who runs a business to start understanding the impact that their activities have on the planet through carbon emissions. So Compare Your Footprint is a, is an opportunity for people to quite simply analyze the carbon emissions that they are producing through their business, and then use that to understand where they sit relative to other businesses of a similar nature, and then act upon it. But the idea that we can sort of point and expect other people to solve these problems, I think is gone. I also don't think it's good enough for us to sit around waiting for central government to solve this issue. I think it's actually up to us as individuals to act. And those are individuals both in what we do at home, but what we do with our businesses as well. And so, yes, I know it's hard to make a living out there. It's never been easy and it's not going to get any easier, but that's not an excuse not to actually take responsibility for the wider implications of what your business does. So, Find out what your carbon emissions are and do something about it. I've known Will for 23 years. He's actually my cousin's— my wife's cousin. And Will has always been passionately involved in climate change and sustainability issues and auditing for as long as I can remember. And I was very interested to hear about the new product that he was developing with Compare Your Footprint. And I have to say, and Green Element and all the work they've ever done has been, you know, my understanding of the highest standard. And this new product seems like a very timely intervention when we need to start taking these issues seriously and we need to start taking responsibility for them sort of personally as business owners and people working in business. So to be developing this now, yes, it's, you know, maybe someone should have done it 20 years ago, but it is being done now and it's exciting to see. And I'm looking forward to being a part of its journey.

Thank you, Will.

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