Council carbon footprint

South Staffordshire Council collects and reports data covering the carbon footprint of our operations and delivery. This demonstrates our emissions in terms of kilograms of Carbon Dioxide equivalent, which is a universal unit of measurements used to indicate the global warming potential of greenhouse gas produced by the council. Since we started reporting on this in 2010, by 2020 we have reduced our overall emission by 25% from our baseline.

The data is collected from three different sources:-

• Scope 1 is our direct emissions including our own fleet vehicle usage and gas usage from council offices and sites
• Scope 2 is our indirect emissions and mainly related to electricity usage across our estate.
• Scope 3 are our other indirect emissions, including waste collected for landfill from our offices, water usage at our sites, and fuel usage related to our outsourced residual waste collection, green waste collection and kerbside recycling contracts.

Scope 1

This accounts for 24% of our total carbon footprint and has seen an increase in recent years due to fuel / red diesel usage within our Street Scene operations

Scope 2

This portion accounts for 13% of our total emissions and has decreased from 2010. The interventions which have carbon reduction benefits brought forward in the community hub build will be monitored over the following years.

Scope 3

This portion accounts for 63% of our total emissions and has seen a decrease over the years – mainly due to fleet replacement and routing of collection rounds on our various waste contracts.

The 2020-21 information is now being collected and will be analysed and presented shortly. The information collected allows us to analyse the way we use our resources and feeds into the climate change strategy and action plan.