We want to tread lightly on the planet and thus logically need to reduce our carbon footprint throughout our operations. However, by how much do we need to reduce in order to really do our fair share in stopping climate change? That we didn’t know.

To meet the 1.5-degree goal set by the Paris Agreement, we need to cut global greenhouse emissions in half by 2030. That is a ‘job’ not only for Edgard & Cooper but will involve every company, every inhabitant, every government to make behaviour changes and act upon it. If we all would live like an average Belgian, we would need 3.8 planets to cater our needs! And fact check, we only have 1 that cannot renew itself without a mass extinction so we better treat it well…

Science-based targets provide a clearly-defined pathway for companies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, helping prevent the worst impacts of climate change and future-proof business growth.

Targets are considered ‘science-based’ if they are in line with what the latest climate science deems necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement – limiting global warming to well-below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

So that raises the question, if global greenhouse emissions need to half by 2030; which impact does this have on our specific operations? Can we simply assume to half our footprint?

Well no, it is not that simple. First of all, calculating our baseline is tricky. All emissions need to be included; all transport, ingredients, us driving our cars but also all electricity used to produce our products. That is a big bunch of data – don’t you think? To make sure we’re off to a good start, we’ve partnered up with a 3rd party - Carbon Intelligence - to set our baseline straight, validate our ambitions and set science-based targets to make sure we’re doing our fair share and basically not ending up ‘doing too little’. Our scope 1 and 2 emissions needed to be reduced by 50% however, as we’re part of the race to zero – we’ll even take it further than that and do our best to reduce our scope 1 and 2 emissions by 100% by 2025. What about our scope 3 emissions? Well, as it turns out 87% of our total emissions originated from our ingredients and so in order to achieve our targets, our emissions need to reduce by 46.2% in absolute reductions (and this while still tripling sales!).