Impact Pillar
Taking Climate Action
Reducing Emissions One Journey At a Time
We believe every business. big and small, must step up to take climate action. In our own operations, we are switching to renewable energy and cutting our carbon emissions to reach net-zero by 2025. As a people business, we know we are in a unique situation to inspire others to take positive climate action alongside us and create more change.
Our people are passionate about taking action on the climate crisis – 70% of our own team members say that climate change is an issue that is important to them.* Together, we want to help educate and inspire our team of temporary workers to take climate action and give them the tools to reduce their climate impact while they work for Arc, and beyond in their daily lives.
Hence, the Climate Action pillar’s goals of our Impact Strategy are twofold:
- To engage people in taking climate action
- To reach Net Zero emissions across our operations
Take CLIMATE ACTION with Arc
Want to make a positive change for the planet? Don’t know where to start or what climate action means? We got you covered, start with a simple pledge to do good with Arc!
We have a goal to inspire 5,000 people on taking positive climate action, and you seem like the type of person who wants to do good – so let’s start today!
Simply choose one of our proposed categories and pledge an action that you can implement into your day-to-day life, at home, and at work.
Make your pledge here.
What Does Net-Zero Mean?
Being Net-Zero means reducing our carbon footprint as much as physically possible and offsetting any remaining emissions that cannot be reduced with credible offsetting partners. While offsetting is not the primary choice when dealing with emissions, by investing in reputable and accredited offset projects, we can support local communities across the world, and generate more education and positive climate action, which are aligned in our impact strategy.
A Quick Guide to Understanding Emissions:
We refer to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as any fossil-fuel generated gas, that contributes to the global warming of our atmosphere.
The GHG Protocol Standard differentiates between 3 different scopes of emissions, based on where and how they were created:
Scope 1 – Direct emissions from owned or controlled sources
Scope 2 – Indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by the reporting company
Scope 3 – All other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain
Read our Emissions Report here for further insight into Arc’s emissions sources.
Our Journey to Net Zero
As part of our ambitious goal to reach Net Zero emissions by 2025, we need to regularly monitor and record emissions that arise from our operations. In 2021, we started our carbon reduction journey with Planetly, a carbon management software that helps us to calculate and monitor our carbon footprint.
Since then, we reported on our emissions and launched a cross-country transport survey where we collected data on how our team members travel to shifts. This data formed an important part of indirect (Scope 3) emissions collection process, as Arc doesn’t have control over it, but can help team members make conscious decisions about their travel choices. The data, collected over a period of six months, showed that the majority of our team members (77%) preferred to use public transport as opposed to private cars (13%) while some tend to walk or cycle to their shifts (10%), not creating any impact at all.
On our journey to reach Net-Zero emissions by 2025, we started to implement carbon reduction measures across our offices. These measures have various impacts, but all contribute to the same goal. One of the most impactful measures was our switch from electricity generated from fossil fuels to a renewable electricity provider. Some other examples of what we have done so far on our Net-Zero journey include:
- Using a pension provider that offers ethical investment
- Undertaking a waste audit and measuring waste monthly (recycled and general) with a goal to divert at least 60% of waste from landfills each month
- Recycling old electric devices and using refurbished laptops
- Using energy-efficient equipment
One of the big challenges that we expect to tackle on our journey to Net-Zero is transportation. The hospitality industry relies on people to travel, which makes transport emissions unavoidable. However, they can be limited or reduced, depending on the mode of transport used. We have developed a progress plan of how we can achieve Net-Zero emissions across the transport category for delivery staff to events and venues across the UK.
- Working with transport providers that use low emission vehicles, and offsetting the GHG emissions ourselves to reach carbon neutrality
- Working with carbon-neutral transport providers
- Working with providers that offer electric buses which use decarbonised energy
- Owning our own transport (long term goal)
There are many steps ahead of us to achieving net-zero emissions, but we are keen to be part of this global journey to limiting the impacts of climate change.
*Results are from a survey of 184 Arc team members in January 2021
Terms & Conditions for the Arc Footprint Leaderboard
- The winning team members must be still employed by Arc at the time of the competition end.
- The winning team members must have worked at least three shifts in the duration of the competition to qualify.
- The winners must provide Arc with the information on which steps they took on Giki Zero, to confirm their eligibility.