In December 2019, Fletcher Building became the first building materials and construction company in Australasia to gain an approved Science-Based Target (SBT) for its carbon reduction plan. Fletcher Building has committed to reduce direct and indirect emissions by 30 percent by 2030 from its 2018 baseline year, which is in line with limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius an accordance with the Paris Agreement . The target was independently verified by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
"Fletcher Building's target is for a 30% of Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions, which are the emissions it directly creates and those from the energy it uses. We have also committed to help our supply chain to reduce their carbon emissions. In doing this, we will have significant, meaningful impact across the building products sector in New Zealand and Australia," says Ross Taylor, Fletcher Building CEO.
Fletcher Steel is leading the charge not only in the Fletcher Building business portfolio but also the New Zealand steel industry in terms of a robust carbon emission reduction strategy. In late December 2019 Fletcher Steel was the first steel distributor to achieve the carbonreduce™ certification.
What is Toitū carbonreduce™?
carbonreduce™ is a programme, audited by Toitu Envirocare, which helps businesses accurately measure their Scope 1 & Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions, along with the addition of the significant Scope 3 emissions from suppliers of air travel, waste sent to landfill, and freight.
What are the different types of emissions?
Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy. Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions that occur in the value chain of the reporting company, including both upstream and downstream emissions.
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What does this mean for Fletcher Steel?
Fletcher Steel meets the criteria of Toitū carbonreduce™ certification having independently audited its greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with ISO 14064-1:2006 and has committed to managing and reducing its emissions in respect of the operational activities of its organisation, which include the CSP Pacific, Pacific Coilcoaters, Easysteel, Dimond Roofing and Dimond Structural, Fletcher Reinforcing and Fletcher Wire Products brands.
Specifically, this means that Fletcher Steel are performing the following activities:
- Accurately measuring, monitoring and reporting the carbon emissions that Fletcher Steel are directly or indirectly responsible for (Scope 1&2)
- Voluntarily monitoring the largest sources of carbon emissions that are related to Fletcher Steel activities, namely freight, waste to landfill and air travel (Scope 3).
- These emission figures are being independently audited annually to the ISO standard, and are being reported as per the Emissions Inventory Report (EIR)
- Have an active Emissions Reduction Management Plan (EMRP) of reducing emissions by 30% by 2030, which uses the information gathered as part of this programme to identify and prioritise projects which will make a meaningful impact on emissions reduction.
While Fletcher Building has committed to a 30% Scope 1 & 2 carbon emissions reduction by 2030, Fletcher Steel has also decided to take this one step further and create a plan to begin to tackle some scope 3 emissions in 2020. This plan includes investigating electric truck trials in partnership with local freight partner, transitioning to biodegradable wrapping for our products, and optimising current business practices to enable the reduced requirement for business travel.
What does this mean for Fletcher Steels customers?
Being certified to carbonreduce™ allows us to have accurate and honest conversations with our customers about what our direct impacts are on the environment. Our experience from undergoing this process to become certificated allows us to assist our customers to also make steps towards accurate carbon footprint measuring and the creation of carbon reduction targets.
We have experienced an increased demand from our customer over the last year for published carbon emission data to accompany tender documentation. Having this data certified and publicly available will make this process easier and we will be developing further supporting documentation in the coming weeks to improve this process further for our customers.
Having been Toitū carbonreduce™ certified means that our products have qualified for additional Greenstar credits across all our brands.
We have the opportunity to source lower embodied carbon steels to further reduce the environmental impact of our and our customers activities, meaning that we will have the ability to offer carbonzero™ solutions to our customers.
What is the next milestone for Fletcher Steel in its carbon reduction journey?
Over the past 12 months been working on improving the energy efficiency of our buildings nationally by taking incremental steps such as transitioning all of our factory lights to either LED or lower energy fluorescent bulbs.
Over the next 12 months we are further improving on our reporting within the business and our external providers to identified further improvements and drive increased opportunities for doing better.
We’ve identified that our largest Scope 3 emission source is the diesel that goes into our freight providers fleet. We are currently working with our major freight suppliers to optimise the loads and trips on order to provide better efficiency gains while we start investigating the option of working with our freight providers to switch to electric vehicle technology.