World Earth Day: How bad is a banana?

Last Saturday was World Earth Day and a year since we launched our Carbon Database, so why did we celebrate World Banana Day on Wednesday 19th April instead? Well… the question is how bad is a banana?

On World Banana Day we invited Dr Emma Fieldhouse from ‘Future We Want’ to lead us in an interactive session that got us thinking about the carbon footprint of our personal lives – from eating a banana to buying pair of leather boots.

Dr Emma Fieldhouse is a career environmentalist, inspirational sustainability leader and practitioner of low carbon solutions. A Women in Innovation award win in 2021, has helped Emma to pivot her small but mighty business, Future We Want to focus fulltime on low carbon engagement using innovative games.

Our Carbon Database has allowed us to record and analyse the carbon impact of our projects, with the ability to segment data by building type and sector. Through this we engage in meaningful discussions with our clients about the carbon impact of designs, especially during concept design stages.

Between Dr Fieldhouses’ insight and our data analysis, we’ve learnt that there is over a million times less carbon in a single banana than our operational carbon emissions as a business for 2022.

We continue to act for a better future.

As part of the session, Niamh McCloskey and Stephen Beggs from our sustainability team announced the targets we’ll be setting as a business to reach Net Zero Carbon, and how we have used our Carbon Database to set embodied carbon targets for future projects, based on analysis of our work to date.

We will share our findings and data publicly in due course, so please stay connected with us for updates on our sustainability journey.