Energy-Saving News

Carbon Trust Awards 100th Standard To HSBC; Doubles Assessment Staff

Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Ross in Corporate Policy, United Kingdom

The controversial seal of approval from the Carbon Trust has been awarded for the 100th time this week to yet another blue chip company, whilst quietly noting that it was taking steps to address the favouritism it has shown to blue-chip companies by expanding the number of assessors that it employs.

Highstreet banking giant HSBC is the latest recipient of the Carbon Trust Standard, following in the footsteps of other popular UK such as Tesco, O2, Go Ahead and Eurotunnel. The combined carbon reduction from firms carrying the Carbon Trust Standard certification totals 600,000 tonnes of CO₂ this year alone.

The number of firms applying for and gaining the standard is expected to double over the next 8 months in the lead-up to the initial phase of the Carbon Reduction Commitment, the UK’s forthcoming national cap-and-trade scheme, as businesses seek to perform well in the scheme’s league tables. The scheme rolls out in 2010 and will encapsulate around 5,000 businesses.

The Carbon Reduction Commitment’s (CRC) league tables are an integral part of the scheme. As well as naming and shaming poorly performing polluters, the funds raised by the scheme are reimbursed to the participating companies based on their league table positions. Most of the companies appearing in the top half of the table will actually profit from the scheme, whilst those languishing in the bottom half will pay for those profits from their own pockets.

The Carbon Trust Standard is controversially relevant to the CRC since attaining the standard accounts for half of the scheme’s early action metric, which for the first year of the CRC will be the only measure used to determine league table positions. Therefore, those attaining the standard then are guaranteed to financially benefit from the scheme.

The Carbon Trust has deliberately focused its’ efforts on key blue chip companies in promoting and enacting its’ certification process. By doing so, 3% of the country’s emissions are now covered by participants in the Carbon Trust Standard scheme. However, such selectivity comes at the cost of condemning thousands of other businesses to the lower reaches of the CRC league tables without hope of early improvement, likely to be tarnished by bad publicity as a result.

Acknowledging the need to ramp up the assessment process, the Carbon Trust announced that it was doubling the number of assessors that it used to help support businesses to collect the necessary carbon data. That increase only takes the number of assessors to 48, however: far too few to offer genuine assistance to anyone but top blue-chip companies. In the light of the carbon accounting procedures which all CRC participants are now having to incorporate into their operations, questions of duplicate efforts also arise.

Image by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary @ Flickr

Related posts:

1. Tesco Awarded Carbon Trust Standard After Absolute Carbon Reductions
2. 60% of UK Business Sleepwalking Into Carbon Reduction Commitment Scheme
3. Blue Chip Hits The Jackpot With 500k Carbon Trust Loan For Energy Efficiency
4. Carbon Trust: Bigger Loans, More Businesses, Less Carbon
5. Carbon Trust Cuts To Fund Green Investment Bank?

Find this article useful? You should subscribe to our RSS feed here.

Tags: carbon reduction commitment, Carbon Trust, HSBC, uk