.eco Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report - 2024

2024 Fiscal Year

Published: November 12th, 2024

About this document

This report describes the boundaries, methodologies, assumptions and key references used in the estimation of the Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Big Room’s operations during the 2024 fiscal year. This document is written to meet the reporting and disclosure requirements of ISO 14064 (International Standard for GHG Emissions Inventories and Verification) and PAS 2060 (the BSI Standard for Carbon Neutrality).

The methodology, calculation and reporting statements have been validated by Inhabit.

Reporting period

The GHG totals are based on estimated emissions during Big Room’s 2024 fiscal year: October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024. This is the third year that we have estimated our greenhouse gas emissions, with the 2022 fiscal year serving as the baseline year. Emission reduction targets and associated changes in emissions in 2024 are calculated relative to this 2022 base year.

We chose 2022 as the baseline year as it was the first year that we calculated our business emissions and had reliable data. 2022 was also typical with respect to our operations, since we gave up our physical office and switched to working fully remotely in 2020. Our operations in 2024 are largely consistent with those of 2022.

In this and subsequent emissions reports, comparisons are made to this base year. Our base year recalculation policy is to recalculate our base year and the prior year emissions for relevant significant changes which meet a significance threshold of 5% of base year emissions.

In this fiscal year, Sustainable Web Design released a new version of their model, version 4. To date, we have used version 3 of the Sustainable Web Design Model to estimate the footprint of our digital services. We have chosen to start using version 4 for this fiscal year and going forward as it is based on more accurate and recent data. However, the new model produces estimates that are approximately 60% below prior estimates. As this leads to a change of more than 5% of our total carbon footprint, we have recalculated our 2022 baseline using the new new model (read more about our decision to rebaseline).

As our reduction targets for the 2024 fiscal year were set using version 3 of the model, we have also compared this year's footprint relative to the original baseline. Our reduction targets for the 2025 fiscal year will be set relative to the new baseline.

Organizational boundary

We follow an operational control approach when defining our organizational boundaries for emissions calculations. We consider direct and indirect emissions associated with Big Room’s core business, the operation of the .eco domain registry and Ecolabel Index.

Big Room does not operate from a physical office. As of 2020, all work is performed remotely from the homes of Big Room employees.

We have decided to include 100% of the electricity and fossil gas use in our homes in our Scope 3 emissions under Category 7: Employee commuting. We exclude emissions from other activities occurring within the home, such as the purchase of food or goods for personal use, garbage or wastewater from our homes, home repairs or personal vehicle use as none of these pertain directly to Big Room’s business.

As Big Room provides digital services as our core business, we include any emissions associated with their operation within our Scope 3 emissions. These digital services operate from data centers run by our partners. We estimate our share of the energy use and associated emissions for our services running on the computer and network hardware in these data centers, along with the energy use of the Internet to transmit data to the end user and the associated estimated power draw of using our services on their digital devices. We follow the Sustainable Web Design methodology for our calculations. We include the emissions associated with digital services in Scope 3 - Category 11: Use of sold products.

This fiscal year, we have also included an estimate of purchased goods (specifically the embodied emissions of computer hardware) under Category 1: Purchased goods and services.

Calculated emissions

The tables below summarize our annual emissions for the 2024 fiscal year by scope, source and model.

Scope 1

Scope 2

Scope 3 - Original baseline and models

Scope 3 - Recalculated Category 11 baseline using Sustainable Web Design v4

Calculation methodology

Category 7: Employee commuting

As we work exclusively remotely, we are accounting for 100% of the electricity and gas use in the homes of Big Room staff. Our homes are located in British Columbia, Canada and we are using emissions factors provided by the provincial government or local energy utilities. Emissions are based on the monthly billing data from our homes.

Electricity

Electricity emission estimates for the 2024 fiscal year are using the updated 2023 Integrated grid emissions factors supplied by the electricity utility.

Fossil Gas

The fossil gas emissions intensity factor is unchanged from the baseline year.

Total 2024 Category 7 emissions: 3.47t CO₂e

While electricity emissions increased by 33% due to a combination of increased electricity use and an increase in the GHG emissions intensity of electricity in BC, this was offset by an 11% decrease gas use, leading to a net reduction in home office emissions of 9%. This reduction was due to fuel switching in home applicances from gas to electricity.

References:

• BC Natural gas emissions factor (g/m³)
• FortisBC natural gas GJ to m³ conversion
• BC Hydro emissions factor for integrated grid

Category 11: Use of sold products

We account for the estimated emission associated with the digital services that we use to operate the .eco top-level domain. This includes web sites and applications, DNS infrastructure, office productivity tools and other digital services that support .eco registrars, registrants and prospects.

In the absence of primary emissions reporting data from our partners, we follow the guidance of the Sustainable Web Design model (SWD) to estimate the footprint of these digital services. The SWD model uses the total amount of data transferred from a service across the Internet as a proxy for estimating emissions. When the data is served from or processed at a known location (such as a data center), we use the emission factors for local electricity generation to calculate the data center component of the footprint. When the location is unknown or broadly distributed, we use a default emissions factor recommended by the model.

As mentioned above, version 4 of the SWD model was released this year and it produces significantly lower estimates than the prior version. We have estimated our FY2024 and baseline emissions using both versions of the model in the tables below.

Estimated emissions using SWDv3

Estimated emissions using SWDv4

In cases where the reported emissions are 0.000 that is because the emissions are below 0.0005 t CO₂e and are rounded to 0.

As some of these services are operated by third parties our ability to optimize their footprint is limited. The increased footprint of the .eco DNS and registry system are due to an increase in query volume due to the continued growth of registered .eco domains. We have monitored the emissions intensity (emissions per request) of these services and they have stayed quite consistent.

For the web properties that we directly manage, we have realized significant emissions reduction from the baseline. There is further work that can be done, however with the smaller estimates due to SWDv4, digital services now make up a smaller proportion of our overall footprint. This makes further optimization a lower priority.

References:

• Sustainable Web Design v4
• Sustainable Web Design v3

2025 emissions reduction target

Last year, we set a target to reduce our overall emissions by 8% from our original 2022 baseline. This is an additional 4% beyond the 4% reduction that we realized in our 2023 fiscal year.

In the 2024 fiscal year, we achieved a 7.71% reduction compared to the original (SWDv3) baseline. This reduction was largely achieved as a result of targeted energy efficiency improvements to our home offices. This was slightly below our 8% target, but we're happy with how close we were to our goal.

When considering our performance using the new SWDv4 model, our reduction from the recalculated 2022 baseline is 5.34%. This is a smaller reduction because the efficiency improvements to our digital services that we made in 2023 are less impactful under SWDv4. As we intend to use SWDv4 going forward, this is the baseline and reduction that we will measure our 2025 target against.

For the 2025 fiscal year, we are anticipating some business travel that may increase our footprint. We are also striving to make some further home office energy improvements. So we are looking to maintain the 5% reduction from our recalculated 2022 baseline.

Emissions management and monitoring

Emissions will be recalculated as part of our annual assessment in October 2025. Detailed emissions calculations are included in a supplemental workbook that is updated at least annually as part of each assessment. Our auditing partners have reviewed and approved the detailed calculations.