BT Carbon Impact Assessment Service

BT’s Sustainability Practice is helping BT and its customers limit their environmental impact, using the BT Carbon Impact Assessment service.

Stadium House is a mixed-use BT building in Cardiff with call centres, data centres, telephone exchanges, and staff leisure areas all under one roof. This makes it a particularly challenging environment for identifying opportunities to reduce CO2 emissions, but it also helps to demonstrate the versatility and practical application of the BT Carbon Impact Assessment.

BT’s Sustainability Practice conducted an assessment using the BT Carbon Impact Assessment service methodology to analyse the building’s CO2 generation and make recommendations for permanent reductions in those emissions.

Under the first phase of the BT Sustainability Practice Carbon Impact Assessment methodology, remote research was conducted to ascertain the numbers of staff in Stadium House by function and to establish staff commuting patterns.

The second phase was a comprehensive on-site assessment, the purpose of which was twofold: first to conduct a survey of large power consuming equipment such as servers, power units, and generators; and secondly to check office equipment in use and audit the business activity taking place. The information gathered was inputted into web-enabled tools designed by the BT Sustainability Practice, enabling, for example, detailed hardware reports and ‘what if’ scenario modelling.

Ted Shann, Sustainability Manager at BT, explained: ‘Ultimately, we are trying to influence behaviour. Carefully analysing the types of carbon emission in this way allows BT to avoid making recommendations that simply displace the generation of CO2 from one point to another.’

For example, if shared services are not considered, an organisation could simply outsource its CO2 without considering the environmental impact of that decision.

Similarly, encouraging individuals to work from home must take into account the fact that, although office energy consumption might decrease, those people will be incurring additional emissions at home.

Ted Shann continued: ‘Failure to consider the full implications of planned actions could otherwise seemingly optimise a carbon footprint but at the expense of, for example, a larger increase in emissions elsewhere.'