Seek Carbon Footprint

Services - Case Study

Written by Andrew Hosie

The client

Seek is the leader in the online employment market in Australia and New Zealand and employs approximately Seek Carbon Footprint

400 people distributed over 10 locations worldwide. Seek also operates an online training and development business in Australia and New Zealand (http://www.seeklearning.com.au/) and a niche operation in the UK targeting Australian and New Zealand jobseekers (http://www.seek.co.uk/).

The challenge

Seek made a commitment to be carbon neutral by June 2008 through their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy, driven by staff wanting to make a positive difference to the environment. As a starting point, Seek engaged Synergetics Environmental Engineering to calculate their carbon footprint in order to quantify the level of carbon offsets they would need to purchase to help them meet their target of being carbon neutral.

The problem

Synergetics identified that offsetting alone was not an environmentally responsible approach to going carbon neutral and negotiations ensued as to the best way forward in terms of reduction. Seek had already spearheaded some great initiatives, such as a 4 star office fit out and a bicycle sharing scheme for close travel but it was uncertain whether these schemes were actually making a measurable reduction in their carbon footprint.

The journey

Together, Synergetics and Seek worked on defining the boundaries of the footprint (as per the Greenhouse Gas Protocol) and negotiated to include some scope 3 emissions, including air travel, waste disposal and office consumables with the view to expand the scope 3 inclusions in future footprints to include staff commuting, and end user electricity consumption.

The solution

Synergetics helped Seek to offset their emissions through accredited (Greenhouse friendly) providers during the first quarter of the footprint, and presented the reduction options with the highest impact to Seek’s CSR board. These included examining the sources of electricity use, switching all offices to government accredited Green Power, joining Sustainability Victoria’s Waste Wise program and putting in motion the beginnings of a paperless office scheme. Further reaching and longer term recommendations were also made, for both Seek data centres and Seek offices.

The results

Seek is currently gathering data for the follow up footprint and both companies are excited to explore more options for improvements and analyse the initial changes.