Climate Positive Business

In October 2017 Dodds & Shute started research into a new business model that would enable us to become a climate positive business and deliver projects with an environmental benefit through carbon offsetting. We are passionate about creating change in our industry and aim to be market leaders for sustainable products as well as beautiful design. So we asked ourselves, what can we do as an intermediary to hold ourselves accountable for the global impact of our sector?

Our solution involved understanding the carbon footprint of our products and offsetting the emissions caused by protecting threatened forests in the Amazon. By offsetting, we have found a solution that addresses emissions for all the products in our portfolio. Not only does our initiative neutralise the carbon emissions associated with our work but our services offer a climate positive solution where we give back to the environment more than we take away.

By purchasing tonnes of carbon from the project our money goes towards action on the ground, to help address the drivers of deforestation. In doing so we are offering impoverished communities a more sustainable way of making a living and protecting habitats for 28 High Conservation Value species such as the Spectacled Bear, Jaguar and Harpy Eagle.

Using benchmark data from FIRA, we can get an appropriate idea of the entire carbon footprint of our products. We therefore know how much we need to offset to ensure we are giving back more than we are taking away. FIRA's work highlights the carbon footprint of each product and the variation in emissions - which for certain products can be significant. This demonstrates the discrepancy between suppliers that are using more sustainable manufacturing techniques, and those that haven’t adopted this approach.

We were keen on a holistic approach to our model. To ensure all furniture is incorporated, we always assumed the worst-case scenario for each product’s emission output; i.e. for a sofa, we use the top end figure 117.9kgCO2e, whereas the emissions output can be a lot lower when supplied from other manufacturers. To take into account uncertainties from this case study, we have added 10% to these figures to ensure what we offset is higher than our actual carbon footprint.

This is what the industry refers to as a climate positive approach rather than a carbon neutral. When an activity goes beyond achieving net zero carbon emissions, to actually create an environmental benefit by removing additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

We hope that our initiatives might encourage others in the industry to take further action on climate change. However, whilst offsetting leads to a reduction in unavoidable carbon emissions, we knew there was more that we could be doing to reduce our impact. We didn't want our offsetting to be used as an excuse to keep on buying unsustainable furniture, with a larger footprint and greater environmental impact. Getting to the bottom of our impact requires further investigation and action.

To learn more about our research into the Furniture Industry and request access to the D&S Sustainability Report please contact us at [email protected].