This year, we have surpassed a 20% reduction target in our total organisation emissions, coming in at 22% lower than our first year. This is our own emissions being actively reduced, not from offsetting by buying carbon credits. While progress has been steady year on year, it almost took us by surprise how quickly we reached such a big milestone. Several significant projects were completed earlier than planned, and our supplier partners have been engaged and focused on the same goals as us, reducing waste and inefficiency.

As part of our Toitū Carbon Reduce certification, our emissions are measured and managed in line with international standards and independently audited each year. We track almost all our organisation’s emissions, not just those directly in our control.

This includes things like fuel used in our vehicle fleet (which we have been transitioning to hybrid), electricity and gas in our ColorShops and manufacturing sites (which we have been upgrading for energy efficiency), and the transport of raw materials and finished products. For this, our teams have been changing how shipments move across the country and where bulk materials are stored to have more efficient transport routes, and creating circular reuse models for packaging and pallets.

We’ve been shifting the balance between waste and recycling, and carefully tracking flights and taxi rides, air-conditioning unit maintenance, and even the weight of paper used to make our fan decks and colour charts. We have been busy questioning every aspect of how we work and investing in a host of improvements that have cut emissions while growing as a business, and brought about better operations and customer outcomes at the same time.

Data from our suppliers and our operations feeds directly into our data model, which matches it to the correct context, e.g. the emissions per kilogram and kilometre travelled of a courier package of colour samples sent out. This allows us to explore and compare our data visually and test potential projects. We can look at it by time, location, emissions type, and associated initiatives, and set targets from large to small while tracking our progress. In our first year, it took us 900 hours of work to compile the data needed – since then, our data model has reduced this to almost nothing and is largely hands-off.

We capture data across all direct emissions, purchased energy, and most other emissions associated with our operations upstream and downstream of our business – emissions from our transport partners being the single biggest category. Some exclusions come from smaller and hard-to-measure areas, which are first estimated from financial data and assessed against an impact threshold for whether they can be justified as exclusions.

Each year, Toitū conducts an extensive audit, tracing calculations in our model back to the original source data. As more organisations measure their carbon footprints, the quality of available data improves. In some cases, we can now use audited and accredited carbon data provided directly by suppliers. It is one aspect of the growing theme we see of how businesses are increasingly working together and sharing accurate information to better understand and improve environmental impacts.

So what is next for Resene?

One of the bigger projects already underway is an engineering and electrification plan to install solar panels across our largest factory buildings. Less obvious reductions will come from projects like rearranging shipping consignments, reducing the number of pallets (and therefore transported weight) needed to move the same volume of product. Alongside this, we are using our carbon data more directly in day-to-day decisions, testing ideas, comparing options, and picking up opportunities to reduce emissions and improve efficiency at the same time.

While embodied product emissions sit outside of our data model and certification, we have also completed full cradle-to-grave lifecycle analysis on twelve of our products. Internally, we want to build a broad view of daily tracked operational emissions through to the years of scientific research that went into our product emissions data (which can be viewed in our published EPDs).

Lastly, we share our learnings and our tools. We have demonstrated our automated data model to other organisations so that they too can develop something to help reduce the cost of their data collection and processing. We are also expanding carbon accounting and certification within the Resene Group.

All of this sits under two core environmental strategies: using our position in the industry to support and improve environmental performance beyond our own organisation, and continuing to reduce our emissions in line with New Zealand’s 2050 targets. We are proud of how far down the track we have already made it and thoroughly enjoy employing the creativity and analysis needed to reduce our emissions, and to be a smarter and more efficient business because of it.

How detailed is our data?

The world of carbon accounting can get technical.

Starting with the emissions factors available from Ministry of Environment published data, for freight alone, there are around 275 different factors to choose from. The unit of measure is tonnes of freight by km travelled. For road freight, you can differentiate by:

• Size of truck

• Fuel type

• Urban vs long haul

• Vehicle age

And so on for other categories of data.

Example: A pallet of paint travelling from our manufacturing site in Naenae, Lower Hutt, to our ColorShop in Wairau Park, Auckland.

We track:

• The weight of the pallet, the paint, and all packaging materials

• The exact kilometres travelled by the truck on its route

• The electricity or fuel used by forklifts to load it

• If the pallet is returned and reused or if it is damaged and sent for chipping and composting

• The weight of any wrap, cardboard, or other packaging tracked through its waste or recycling pathway

Using the right emissions factors as advised by Toitū, we multiply our data by the emissions factor values to get the carbon emissions for that activity.