The Body Shop Australia's Carbon Management Journey Thus Far...

Ok all you carbon nerds out there... this one is for you!

To determine a company's carbon footprint, you have to measure how much they are emitting. There are three different levels of emissions:

Scope 1: What fossil fuels are burnt in the course of doing business, including LPG gas to warm offices, run forklifts and pool cars.
Scope 2: What emissions are caused by the electricity you use.
Scope 3: Emissions created by suppliers, eg paper, transport, freight and flights. This is still a bit contentious. Some company's don't consider any Scope 3 emissions as they believe them to be the supplier's scope 1 emissions responsibility. We feel it's definitely part of a shared responsibility.

So now you've determined your carbon footprint.

It's best practice to reduce as much of your emissions as possible... It's impossible to reduce everything at the moment, that's why businesses "offset" emissions they can't avoid. Offsets are investments in renewable (clean) energy or technology to remove carbon from the the atmosphere (yes trees are the best 'technology' we have so far).

The dotted black line is the standard boundary of what companies usually offset to in-order to claim carbon neutrality.





This is where The Body Shop Australia's emissions come from. (Note: we only started "carbon accounting" in 2007.)

We're not perfect but we're trying to be transparent about our carbon management journey so others might pick up on a few things that might help them.

Scope 3 emissions we're currently recording include:
rental cars, reimburse private car mileage, air travel (domestic), air travel (international), A4 & A3 office paper and bathroom paper towels.

The Body Shop acknowledges a need to measure more Scope 3 emissions, including; freight transport, staff commuting, taxis, couriers and waste disposal. We continue to work with our suppliers to calculate these scope 3 emissions and commit to adding them to our carbon accounts as soon as they are discovered.

The good news is that based on 2007 levels (our base year), we have already reduced our emissions by 12%!

Here's a good summary of all our emissions and offsets so far. Click on the graphs to get a better look at it.

So in 2009/10 we switched from GreenPower offsets to Gold Standard and Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) offsets.

Gold Standard offsets are world's best practice and sometimes have an additional social benefit to the local community as they provide employment in developing countries.

We teamed up with Climate Friendly, who helped us to chose two Gold Standard Projects to offset our Scope 1 & 2 Emissions:

1. a wind farm in Turkey and
   
2. a landfill to gas project in China
   

To offset our Business Flights (Scope 3) we chose a VCS Project which provides people in Cambodia with more efficient cooking stoves.

(More about these coming soon!)

Hey (Saint) Jude

By Genevieve Aldridge - Work Experience Student

Hi my name's Genevieve I'm doing work experience at The Body Shop with the Values team. Adam asked me to share my experience of visiting The School of St. Jude in Arusha, Tanzania last January, so here it is:

The School of St. Jude was set up in 2002 by Gemma Sisia, an Australian woman from NSW and its’ aim is to ‘fight poverty through education’ the school relies totally on donations from individuals, businesses and fundraising events.

Every year, thousands of children are tested for their academic ability and for those who pass, their background is checked meaning only the brightest and poorest students are given a place at the school. The school caters for everything the children need including uniform, books, boarding houses, buses, meals, clean water, medical attention and obviously a top quality education.

A normal class in Tanzania would contain a blackboard, some chalk and over 50 students, in comparison, St. Jude’s classes average 25 students, numerous textbooks, competent teachers and even computers!

When I visited the school, the first thing that struck me was the vibrancy; the brightly painted play equipment, the gleaming colourful buses, and of course hundreds of children running around, shouting, dancing and singing. We ate lunch with the students (rice and beans) and helped out in their art classes, all the craft supplies are scraps or donations or in the library, which holds hundreds of donated books!

After school we visited the boarding house, built by locals. Rukia and Margret, students at the school and self-appointed tour guides and lead us through around one km of banana plantation before we arrived at the boarding house. They proudly displayed their spotless room, study rooms, washrooms and introduced us to their matron.

The next day, we visited Margret’s house, it was a two room mud brick house, one room to sleep in, and a living room. There was no electricity or running water and chickens were scratching the dirt floor ‘because they eat the bugs’ she explained. Margret’s father is a teacher at the local school and her mother takes care of the house. Margret tells us ‘I was so happy I got in, otherwise, I would have no education because my family cannot afford to send us (her and her four brothers) all to school’.

To compare her opinion to that of a typical Australian ‘school sucks, I hate it’ attitude was sad. We have so many opportunities, yet we continually throw them away, when there are thousands of children across the globe who’d give everything for a decent education.

The boarding house opened in 2008 and was much appreciated by students and parents. This boarding house means students no longer have to wake up at 4:30am and walk down mountains to their bus stop, do their homework by candlelight, go to bed hungry, or share a bed with several relatives. The school has employed hundreds of locals and given thousands of children an opportunity to create a better life for themselves and their family.

It was amazing experience, seeing how big a difference one woman can make; Gemma’s work has pulled thousands of children out of extreme poverty and given them the skills to help their family out of poverty too. It was very humbling to see how hard they worked and how happy they always were, despite the hardships they faced.

Returning to Australia was such a shock, seeing all the wasted materials and hearing so much negativity took some getting used to, as did the lack of friendliness and generosity among strangers. It was saddening to realize how often we are dissatisfied or ungrateful with what we have, when there are millions who struggle through each day just to survive.

Please support The School of St. Jude.

THANK YOU FOR HELPING US TO STOP SEX TRAFFICKING!

By Adam Valvasori - Values Man


CAMPAIGN 2010 - END OF YEAR REPORT

In Australia and around the world, The Body Shop has been campaigning non-stop for almost 6 months to stop the heinous crime which involves buying, transporting, drugging, beating, selling and re-selling of little children and young people into the commercial sex industry.

It's disgusting, it's disturbing but the fact is, it happens all over the world and it’s the fastest growing and 3rd most lucrative crime after drug and gun trafficking.

But you’ve made a real difference in stopping it.

This is the second year of our campaign and we partnered again with Child Wise for a three-pronged strategy to educate, fundraise and lobby the Governement.

1. Education – We are trying to empower ordinary Australians to speak up and report suspicions of child sex tourism or abuse when travelling overseas, in Australia or online. We did this by distributing free postcards and selling luggage tags with ways to report offences. We are confident this will help stop the demand for child prostitutes.

Results: 44,684 Luggage Tags sold and distributed 53,200 free info postcards, dedicated training for all our staff and countless conversations in-store to raise awareness about the issue.


2. Fundraising – We have been selling limited edition Soft Hands Kind Heart hand creams to raise money for Child Wise projects which protect children in Cambodia (a notorious sex trafficking source and destination country).

Results: 100% of campaign hand cream & luggage tag proceeds going to Child Wise, which so far equates to $341,178.93.

3. Advocacy – As one business we are helping to make a considerable difference –in Australia and Cambodia, but we are calling on the Government to help make an even bigger impact across our region. We have very good laws around child sex tourism, however no one knows about them! We need an ongoing public education campaign for Australians going overseas. We are also asking the Government to target much more of our tax-payer-funded, overseas aid budget, towards protecting children and preventing child sex trafficking in our region.

We aimed at collecting a quarter of a million signatures and thanks to the commitment of our staff and concern from customers such as yourself about this terrible child and human rights abuse we made that target! We will present the petition to a Member of Federal Parliament in the new year to be tabled in the House of Representatives. We're hoping it will be The Hon Kevin Rudd, Minister for Foreign Affairs & Trade who a few of our Loganholme (Qld) staff met on his election campaign trail this year ->

Results: 254,085 Australians have added to their voice to ours. Together we strongly ask our Government to do much more to stop the demand and supply of innocent children into the commercial sex industry in our region. Around the world The Body Shop has collected more than 4 million signatures making it our biggest campaign ever!


Thank you once again for your support of our campaign.
We are keeping the petition online for a while so you can still help out by passing the link on to your friends and family. There is also a limited supply of campaign hand creams and luggage tags available online.

Merry Christmas from Adam & Deb
Values Team
The Body Shop Australia

TONIGHT: 7.30 Report to air Animals Australia live export investigation

By Rachel Muraca - Customer Service

The below text & photos are taken from the Animals Australia website.

















Tonight's 7.30 Report on ABC1 (Thurs 2nd Dec) is scheduled to air a groundbreaking report on Animals Australia's recent Middle East investigation, exposing ongoing cruelty in the live animal export trade.

Animals Australia investigators have recently returned following our seventh investigation in the Middle East to document the treatment of Australian animals exported live for the Festival of Sacrifice.

Already images released during the investigation have prompted new calls to end the cruel live animal export trade. But tonight, the full story will be revealed as ABC's flagship current affairs program 7.30 Report airs never-before-seen investigation footage, bringing the stories suffered by Australian animals half a world away to the television screens of Australians who can demand better from their government.

Tonight you'll hear a first-hand account from Animals Australia's investigator Lyn White, as well as HRH Princess Alia of Jordan who is one of the many caring Muslims struggling to raise animal welfare standards in the region whilst countries like Australia continue to implicitly reinforce cruel practices by supplying animals to known abuses.

With a new Australian federal minister responsible for animal welfare, the timely exposure of this cruel trade to the Australian people is paramount. Please consider sending your thoughts on the story to minister Joe Ludwig after the program has aired. You will find details on our website after the show.

Please encourage friends, colleagues and family to watch 7.30 Report tonight.