[rob_c]

Can we stop with the nonsense footprint, token, credit system. Having a single data scientist unfortunately does not a fix make it just stalls the whole thing and leads to bad over engineered, overly technical solutions.

Companies would be better investing in encouraging people to behave better on compus if they were serious, and I mean by actually investing to make using eco friendly things pleasent, not using brown paper to give printouts to clients or having some guy who shouts about the wrong paper going in the wrong bin all the time.

Companies should buy things that people want that produce less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down), consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to clients). And when companies start doing this rather than individuals it has a knock on effect on the market and affordability.

And finally, I'm sorry, I fail to understand why anyone needs to pay to be told this.

[phtrivier]

> Companies should buy things that people want that produce less waste (yes this then drives cost up and profits down), consolidating physical services (it, printing, office space etc.) and using recycled products by preference (again good recycled paper is not brown toilet paper and can even be given to clients).

Yes, and the goal of carbon accounting is basically to give actual data about which of these things offer the better trade off between the goal of reducing emissions and keeping the lights on in your business.

The exercise is only as useful as the actions it enables. Short of absolutes ("just close shop ! The greenest form of transportation is, after all, the hearse") or "one size fits all" solutions, there is some level of accounting that's needed.

The biggest risk, of course, is that the customer hides all information about its emission and just wants you to package a shiny report to fuel the marketing department's greenwashing op.

I'll soon be working for one of bend competitors, it seems, so I'll get to see how it goes...

[mihaic]

Sorry to see you downvoted friend.

I've been lamenting for a while the sole metric that is being used for environmental impact is "carbon footprint", just so that bureaucrats and companies can have something to measure while appearing to do something.

PFAS and microplastics might be damaging our genetic material, but their very existence if meaningless to the CO2 metric.

A bad metric is worse than no metric at times.

[thomasmost]

To be fair, I think a solution like Bend would help companies make the kinds of decisions your advocating for. "You can't improve what you don't measure," so Bend offers a measurement tool that enables procurement managers to make smart buying decisions. Companies pay lots of money for other internal reporting tools; why should sustainability be any different?