Kingfisher
An exemplar of corporate environmental responsibility
Kingfisher plc is an international home improvement company with over 1,900 stores and a workforce of over 78,000 people.
It operates in eight countries across Europe under retail banners including B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama and Brico Depot. The company is committed to sustainability, with an ambitious target to reach net zero in its operations by 2040 and across its entire value chain by 2050.
Kingfisher wished to gain a clear view of the carbon emissions from its technology estate as an important strand of its corporate sustainability strategy. Being a consumer brand, the company understood that sustainability was important not only to its workforce but also its customers, for whom sustainability was an increasingly important differentiator. Becoming aware of Scott Logic’s sustainability services through the promotion of our proposed Technology Carbon Standard (TCS), Kingfisher commissioned us to provide the means of mapping and measuring the carbon emissions of its technology estate.
Through a short, focused engagement, we rapidly delivered a comprehensive framework tailored to Kingfisher’s needs, leaving the company equipped with the means to map, measure and mitigate its emissions in pursuit of its sustainability goals. The project was the first comprehensive application of the TCS in the retail sector, establishing a new benchmark for environmental responsibility in corporate technology management.
Thanks to Scott Logic, we have gained an unprecedented perspective on the breadth and depth of Kingfisher’s technology carbon footprint. Combining granular detail with group-wide visibility across our retail banners, the baseline provides actionable insights that we will use to shape carbon reduction initiatives in pursuit of our sustainability goals.
Jenny Wilson, Group Chief Architect, Kingfisher plc
Mapping and measuring at pace
The TCS provides an approach that enables consistent analysis and benchmarking of organisations’ technology carbon footprints. By mapping their technology estate into categories analogous to Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol scopes, organisations can more easily identify the most carbon-intensive areas to prioritise for impact reduction.
With our tried-and-tested TCS, we were able to get straight to work in mapping Kingfisher’s technology estate.
The process was accelerated thanks to the passion for sustainability of the Kingfisher stakeholders and the high quality of the company’s Asset Management Database. Using this, we were able to produce a rapid delineation of the estate in terms of its most common devices and systems. We could then devote more time to filling gaps in the data and researching the emissions from device types we had not encountered before.
Despite the growing importance to companies like Kingfisher of assessing and reducing their carbon footprints, many technology suppliers remain reluctant to share data on emissions. Cloud service providers complicate matters further by adopting different measurement methodologies.
In response, open-source methodologies have been established enabling robust estimates to be made; the TCS adopts and extends the most trusted of these methodologies. Transparency is a core value of the TCS, so the project relied exclusively on publicly available data. In our comprehensive assessment of Kingfisher’s technology estate, we highlighted every assumption and supplied the underpinning methodology.
Tackling the Scope 3 challenge
The Greenhouse Gas Protocols categorise emissions into Scope 1 (direct emissions from sources an organisation owns, e.g. a power generator), Scope 2 (indirect emissions from purchased energy), and Scope 3 (indirect emissions not covered by Scopes 1 and 2, e.g. carbon embodied in the production of hardware devices). Scope 3 is challenging to measure.
On the supply side, some manufacturers and suppliers are better than others in sharing emissions data. What’s more, there’s no regulation or standardisation with regard to reporting. Manufacturers can choose what to include in their assessments and apply inconsistent methodologies to different products.
When mapping and measuring their own carbon footprints, organisations can also be selective in what they measure and report under Scope 3. Not so with Kingfisher. The company sought a clear-eyed perspective on emissions across its entire value chain so that it could make evidence-based decisions on mitigations.
As a retailer with in-store Point of Sale systems alongside the usual laptops and employee devices, it was important to Kingfisher to have accurate measurements across all scopes. This would allow the company to estimate and mitigate the carbon impacts of, for example, opening a new store.
Our Technology Carbon Standard was specifically designed to provide accurate metrics in the absence of standardised reporting by suppliers. At Kingfisher, we were assisted in this by the quality of its asset database. While we used average embodied carbon figures for some devices such as laptops, we conducted targeted research into other hardware, capturing accurate carbon figures for in-store devices, networking and infrastructure hardware, and servers and storage devices.
Collectively, these upstream sources of Scope 3 emissions accounted for almost half of the company’s technology carbon footprint, and so the accurate measurements would provide clear targets for its carbon reduction strategies.
One aspect of the Scope 3 mapping particularly impressed Kingfisher and illustrated the efficacy of the TCS as a framework. Our stakeholders were surprised not only by the number of televisions across the group’s stores, but also how much power they consumed and how much embodied carbon they contained.
What impressed them was how the TCS provided both a holistic view of the scale of their technology estate, but also the ability to drill down into the device data for different retail banners and regions. This level of granularity exceeded their expectations and would allow precise targeting of their carbon reduction interventions.
Capturing comprehensive data centre figures
The technology estate of many organisations, including Kingfisher’s, includes on-premises servers and storage. The usual measure of carbon impact for these data centres is the purchased energy required to run these systems, which falls under Scope 2. However, this doesn’t always provide the full picture. Kingfisher is not alone in possessing back-up generators to power its data centres in the event of a significant outage. Emissions from generators fall under Scope 1.
Our mapping of the technology estate identified the generators and prompted us to request fuel and usage estimates that we could factor into our calculations. Regardless of how rarely the backup power generators were used, this additional data contributed to the comprehensiveness of the baseline we supplied to Kingfisher.
Setting a new standard for corporate environmental responsibility
Through this pioneering collaboration with Scott Logic, Kingfisher set a new standard for corporate responsibility in retail and demonstrated exceptional leadership in addressing the environmental impact of digital infrastructure. The comprehensive analysis of the company’s technology estate provided a foundation on which Kingfisher could shape targeted, evidence-based carbon reduction strategies. It also provided a baseline against which progress could be monitored and reported.
Following the engagement, as a recommended enhancement to this baseline, Kingfisher implemented the Cloud Carbon Footprint tool within its infrastructure, improving the measurement of its cloud service emissions.
As the first major retailer to adopt the TCS in assessing its technology estate, Kingfisher blazed a trail in its sector, demonstrating that large-scale technology carbon accounting is both possible and necessary. The company also provided a replicable model that other retail organisations could follow, including a method of addressing the challenging area of Scope 3 emissions.
It was a privilege for Scott Logic to support Kingfisher not only in progressing towards the company’s own carbon reduction goals, but in being an exemplar to other retailers of leadership on sustainability.