PGH Lab 7.0 — Kloopify
How the City of Pittsburgh is reviewing greenhouse gas emissions to the source
Kloopify partnered with the Sustainability and Resilience Division of the Department of City Planning as well as the Procurement Office to assess the City’s current procurement process. The company produced a report ranking contributors to the City’s carbon footprint, combined with recommendations on how to reduce overall emissions. This article takes a first person look at that report’s progress, findings, and ultimate impact on the City.
Check out this accompanying one-minute project overview showcasing our City and Company team!
Phase 1 — Identifying the Partnership
Kloopify’s arrival could not have come at a better time. Just three months before Kloopify made its pitch to PGH Lab, a years-long effort had finally come to a close for the Procurement and Sustainability teams with the completion of the second Voluntary Local Review (VLR) of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Pittsburgh had committed to these SDGs back in 2019 and the newest VLR was focused on how City procurement processes could be more sustainable and circular in nature.
As a part of their PGH Lab pilot, Kloopify offered to assign, track, and rank all of the city’s procurement purchases. Their service filled two gaps: 1) showcasing SDG progress made and 2) determining which third party suppliers would offer the greatest reductions in CO2 emissions. Before Kloopify, tracking CO2 emissions like this was simply not an option for the Sustainability team. Gaining access to City data in this way would allow them to create new emission reduction strategies while being thoughtful on the impact those strategies would have.
The City’s theory was simple: by identifying which procurement areas emitted the most CO2, we could focus on partnering with those third-party suppliers whose processes accounted for the bulk of the City’s carbon footprint. By reducing the emissions of these suppliers, we would in turn be reducing our own City emissions levels. This idea follows an age-old principle: you are what you eat. If we could help our procurement partners reduce their emissions, every new item or service we consumed in the future would also realize those CO2 reductions and help us meet our SDG goals.
Phase 2 — The Pilot and the Data
The Kloopify pilot was broken down into four Phases with a report ultimately being generated for the Procurement and Sustainability teams.
- Break down all procurement purchases into 15 Green House Gas (GHG) categories
- Calculate the emissions of all suppliers and identify our top 3–5 emitters
- Work with suppliers to reduce their emissions (thereby reducing emissions for the City)
- Review all data and determine best course of action, considering how City spending effects the greater Pittsburgh environment
In order to best showcase what was possible with the Kloopify platform, the company was provided with all City procurement data from 2021. The original project scope for Kloopify was to process about one third of that data for the pilot. Instead, the team went above and beyond, mapping ~75% of all 2021 data provided. More shocking still, Kloopify was able to clean, process, and organize all this data in less than three months, quickly moving the team into Phase 3.
Overview of 2021 data provided:
- $71 million spent on procurement purchases
- 1,419 unique suppliers in total
- 41,609 purchases and 1,030 unique purchases
Phase 3 — The Results and Findings
Once the data were analyzed, a few interesting trends emerged. Out of 1,419 suppliers that the City partnered with in 2021, only 36 suppliers made up 33,800 tons of CO2, and only 48 suppliers made up 80% of the City’s 71 million dollars spent on procurement purchases. With Kloopify’s platform the team was able to track back and plainly see which spend areas had a disproportionate impact on the amount of CO2 produced.
33,800 tons of CO2 per year is equal to any of the following:
· 26,704 gas powered passenger cars for one year
· 15,611 homes energy use per year
· 13,945,463 gallons of gas consumed
· 5,060,785 propane cylinders used for home barbeques
Some of the top four industry areas with the largest impact on City CO2 emissions were more expected than others. Unsurprisingly, Construction came out on top as the largest emitter of CO2. A bit more surprising however were the runners-up: Apparel, Utilities, and Waste Management.
Armed with this new data, the Sustainability team can now enter Phase 4 and begin to think holistically about how and where to focus our reduction efforts. Kloopify offered a unique and insightful way for the City to take action. With luck, the data that the company received during its Pittsburgh pilot will help other cities follow suit.
Kloopify keeps an inhouse database of all the suppliers they work with in order to accurately track the CO2 emissions of any one procurement service. At the beginning of the pilot, Pittsburgh got to take advantage of existing supplier metrics to trace some emissions while helping to validate any gaps the dataset. This provided some immediate results for the team to review while Kloopify built out new supplier data for procurements unique to the Pittsburgh ecosystem.
Phase 4 — Done?
At the time of this article’s completion the Sustainability and Resilience Division of the Department of City Planning as well as the Procurement Office were looking for ways to sustain these services beyond the PGH Lab pilot. The report generated by Kloopify helped shed light on where Pittsburgh’s carbon emissions originate and provided departments and policy makers access to higher quality data. Our hope is that this data will not only help the City reach our personal SDGs, but also help Pittsburgh supply chains at large make a sustainable shift to a greener future.
Pittsburgh, with the help of Kloopify, has begun to unlock the power of sustainable procurement.
The PGH Lab 8.0 application will be live through October 21st, 2022 and can be found on the PGH Lab homepage.
