Tuesday 20th August 2024
Kirsten with the Recorra team at Cory Environmental
I’m back with another ‘Carbon Catchup’, where I share Recorra’s progress towards net zero.
The highlight of the month was a trip I took with the team to Cory Environmental, our Energy from Waste (EfW) partner. Cory process and transform waste into byproducts that can be reused as road aggregate, breeze blocks, reclaimed metal, and energy. I was there to tour the site and better understand their process and their carbon capture plans. I learnt a huge amount about just what happens to our general waste when we pass it over to the incinerator. Warning – general waste is not sorted prior to incineration – so when you put recycling in the general waste, thinking it must get sorted anyway – it won’t! Make sure you recycle everything you can!
The rest of this month’s work has been focused on data and carbon accounting- we’re trawling through lines of procurement data as I write this. It’s rather nitty-gritty work and involves continuously making decisions about how to process data accurately, while keeping the task manageable. Due to how opaque carbon accounting can be, I wanted to mention a few heroes working in this space.Firstly, the incredible Mike Berners-Lee, whose detailed work on emissions factors is incredibly helpful. His books ‘There Is No Planet B’, and ‘How Bad Are Bananas?’ deserve all the praise they receive. The other hero (amongst others) that I’ve been referencing a lot is Hannah Ritchie – how many people make their raw data available to freely download? The website Our World In Data is just a fantastic resource that we’ve been using to create some tailored services for our industry. I’ve got a bunch of climate books on my reading list, and her book ‘Not The End Of The World’ is on there.Finally, a bit on the client side – I was at 30 Fenchurch yesterday, assisting our sustainability consulting team with a Lunch and Learn and trying out some new content. The whole team does great work, and I’m working to provide the climate context to everything Recorra does to advance real recycling. A busy month! But lots to be excited about going forwards.
