Calculating BlaBlaCar’s internal carbon footprint

A behind-the-scenes look at how teams across BlaBlaCar got together to calculate the carbon footprint of its offices worldwide.

Happy World Environment Day. A time to celebrate nature, raise awareness, and reflect on how to take action for a more inclusive and sustainable planet. A typical starting point to taking action is understanding one’s impact on the environment. “You only improve what you can measure.” It is in that spirit that I wish to share the behind-the-scenes journey of calculating BlaBlaCar’s internal carbon footprint; and because collective action goes a long way, I’d also like to share best practices with companies who wish to do the same.

Part 1: Why calculating our footprint matters to us

BlaBlaCar was created in 2006 with one dream in mind: fill the millions of seats on the road that go unfilled. In Europe, 76% of long-distance travel is done in cars with at least three empty seats. So, we saw a unique opportunity to use technology to optimize the efficiency of road travel and create an efficient, affordable and friendly mobility network that allows twice as many people to travel in cars already on the road while still avoiding carbon emissions at scale.

In the Zero Empty Seats study, we found that BlaBlaCar saves 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 a year — it’s as if Paris was free of cars for a year! That’s the beauty of a platform designed to tackle waste on the road: the more the platform grows, the more CO2 we save.

Beyond the virtuous impact of our activity, we also wanted to ensure that we minimize our carbon footprint as a team in our office life. And the first step to do so is to measure and understand the main factors that drive our internal emissions. We started calculating the carbon footprint of our offices in 2019 as the first necessary step to improve and track our performance over time.

It’s been an eye-opening, challenging and rewarding exercise. It allowed us to start important conversations with our suppliers, raise awareness around the issue of sustainability internally, and create momentum around improving our impact and the impact of our stakeholders. Most of all, it’s an important cross-team experience that allows different offices to come together for a greater purpose.

Part 2: The methodology

To calculate our internal footprint, we turned to the specialists: we collaborated with consulting firm Carbone 4, specialized in helping companies identify and reduce their footprint, who are also thought leaders in the fight against climate change. They provided us with a calculation tool that split emissions into the following categories:

• Building emissions
• Travel
• IT equipment & data centers
• Waste
• Spending

“It has been a pleasure to work on the calculation of BlaBlaCar’s internal operations carbon footprint, which is the first and necessary step when developing an ambitious climate strategy.” — Christina Stuart, Senior Consultant at Carbone 4.

It’s important for studies like this to have a set perimeter in order to make accurate comparisons throughout the years. Ours was: January 1 to December 31, across our 7 offices worldwide (Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Moscow, Warsaw, Kyiv, São Paulo).

We set up an internal audit task force, composed of representatives from the Facilities, Finance, People, IT, Engineering and Communications teams. The role of that task force was to collect and report activity data into a common grid.

Activity data refers to, for example, the € spent on training or telecommunications services, the number of km traveled by office via train, or the amount of paper consumed in tonnes, in a given year. Each activity data is associated with an emissions factor — in other words, how much emissions 1 km via train in a given country generates. It can be explained by the following equation:

Here is an example (not related to BlaBlaCar’s activity) to puts that equation into play:

A carbon footprint is therefore the sum of all of these activities. And the main challenge to calculate it is to gather the data that allows you to compute it. This data resides in many different teams, who typically have never tracked it previously. There is therefore a challenging set-up effort in 1) embarking colleagues across many different teams and 2) having them design the right process to collect data that was not readily available beforehand. Once this hurdle is overcome, the rest of the process is fairly straightforward.

“The first time, it took me a while to collect all the information, but suppliers and colleagues were kind and helpful and I got all the numbers requested. Fortunately, people are more and more aware of the importance of this kind of project so everyone is happy to be part of it, and it is very gratifying to see the results across the years and learn that with some little changes you could get big results! #begreengofar” — Marta Ramos Hurtado, Office Manager in Spain

Part 3: Results and how they compare to 2019

Our emissions in 2020 amounted to 1,700 tonnes of CO2, a 17.3% decrease from 2019. The sanitary crisis forced all of us to work from home for most of the year, which resulted in lower emissions from travel, office energy consumption, waste, and more. Of course, these emissions did not “go away” but were outsourced to people’s homes. Even if our complete footprint is not reflected in the results, it does not change our ambition to always tend toward lower emissions.

Here is how our footprint evolved in the last two years by emissions category:

As you can see, everything decreased significantly, except for the datacenters and IT equipment category, going up by 11%. That’s because 2020 was the year we migrated our data to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). During this migration, both our physical data centers located in France (which we no longer own) and GCP had to be kept active, which explains the spike in energy consumption. This rate should therefore go down in 2021.

You can also see the effect of growing the team in our office-by-office comparison above. We multiplied our team in Kyiv ten-fold in the last year, which explains why emissions rose by 43% for that office.

As you can see below, our ‘spending’ represents the majority of our emissions (64%). Spending ranges from fees (auditing, banking, insurance, etc), to material goods (furniture, goodies, etc) to services (construction, employee training, telecommunications, etc), so it covers a very wide range of activities.

Through the tool, we found that the more we spend, the more emissions we generate. This correlation is important because it doesn’t pin economic gain and climate action against each other: the more we save in terms of money, the fewer emissions we generate!

However, the fact that emissions are indexed to spending revealed a frustrating paradox: at BlaBlaCar, we strive to purchase sustainable products such as goodies, cleaning supplies, food & drink. Yet today, generally, the more eco-friendly and responsible a product, the more expensive it will be. Therefore, the tool will not recognize responsible purchasing, and will instead associate it with higher emissions.

Many small virtuous suppliers with a positive impact have not yet calculated their emissions, so the factor applied to them will overestimate their emissions. This encourages us to ask our suppliers to report on their carbon footprint and hold them accountable so that we can get a more accurate picture of our resulting emissions. When that’s not possible, it’s important not to dwell on numbers but to focus on the reality and quality of our commitment to offer a sustainable workplace for our employees, even if it’s not reflected in the results.

Part 4: Best practices and what’s next

If your team is thinking about calculating its own carbon footprint, here are some tips we’d like to share with you:

• Be clear on the WHY. Doing this for the first time means having to initiate conversations around the importance of a carbon footprint with many stakeholders. Whether you’re trying to get information from a team member or from an external supplier, you’ll want to be able to explain why it matters and why you’ll need that same data for the years to come.
• Management buy-in: involve the management of the team members whose time and commitment you’ll need to deliver on the project. Since it’s time-consuming, we need management to carry the why to put all chances on your side.
• Alignment. Schedule regular check-points with your team, especially if it is the first year. There will be many questions and many particularities to your organization that don’t necessarily fit within the bounds of the calculation tool. It’s best to ask questions as early as possible.
• Data ownership and sanity checks. The devil is in the details! There is a lot of data to keep track of, and some might fall through the cracks. It is important to find a reporting system that works for your team and allows you to keep track of the data flow and establish clear ownership over information. In order to detect any anomalies or typographic errors, it helps to check orders of magnitude; and when you do the audit over a few years, to check year-by-year if anything evolved in a surprising way.

What’s next?

Following our first carbon audit in 2019, we were ready to create and execute an action plan that would aim to reduce our carbon footprint. We created an ESG task force to oversee the creation of that action plan. However, with Covid-19, we knew that any effort to reduce our footprint would be overshadowed by a drop in business travel, commuting, building emissions, waste, and more. And with a big part of the team on partial activity, it was hard to deliver fully on that ambition.

This year, as we’re still mostly remote, we’ve decided to focus on using our learnings from this audit to:

• Improve the data collection process: how can we be better organized? How can we avoid or identify mistakes? How can we set up our accounting and reporting systems in order to retrieve data more easily?
• Shape the workplace experience in our next Paris HQ office: we’re currently building our new Paris headquarters, complying with the most demanding energy and environmental standards with international BREEAM certification (Level: “Very Good”). The audit provides a good framework to understand what a sustainable workplace looks like, to take action, and quantify the efforts made.

“Sustainability has always been in BlaBlaCar’s DNA, even before the audits. For our next offices, we’re in the process of designing our waste-sorting system, with composting to feed a rooftop vegetable garden. We’re also thinking of a pure or osmosis water station to lower our reliance on cleaning products, and when we do use them to use only organic and natural products such as citric acid or vinegar. These annual audits challenge us to improve our CSR approach and reinforce our ability to find solutions, change habits, and involve all our employees in the process.” — Muriel Havas, Head of Facilities at BlaBlaCar.

Thank you to Verena Butt d’Espous for the review of this article. Thank you to Christina Stuart, Marta Ramos and Muriel Havas for the great quotes. And THANK YOU to the audit team for making all of this happen: 🇫🇷 Muriel, Majid, Flora, Andrews, Victor, Mathieu, Fiona 🇷🇺 Yuliya 🇩🇪 Mara 🇪🇸 Marta 🇵🇱 Sylwia 🇧🇷 Ricardo 🇺🇦 Anastasiia and Aleksey.