Setting up custom activity categories
In Carbon+Alt+Delete, Operational Boundaries are reflected as Activity Categories. By default, you will find Direct, Electricity, Upstream Scope 3, and Downstream Scope 3. It is however possible to create custom activity categories to measure anything. Common examples include:
- Splitting Goods and Services into distinct categories
- Measuring Mobile Combustion by vehicle type
- Splitting up Employee Commuting and Homeworking
- Measuring emissions associated with water
- Etc.
Let's take a closer look at the example of measuring the emissions associated with water in your organization.
Setting the boundaries
In Carbon+Alt+Delete, you can adjust Boundaries to fit a company's needs. In this example, we want to separate out water as its own activity category for our reports. We do this by going to the Activity Categories tab in Boundaries. Next, we create a new element and name it something appropriate, like "S3 Water". Now we need to add our activity categories. In Carbon+Alt+Delete, you can't create completely new activity categories as each category needs to be connected to an existing GHGP category. So what we will do instead is duplicate the categories "Goods & Services" and "Waste" and move these to the newly created element "S3 Water". We can now rename them to something more fitting, like "Purchased Water" and "Waste Water".
These new categories will appear in our dashboards as separate categories in their own category group, but as far as the GHGP is concerned, they are still "Purchased Goods and Services" and "Waste Generated in Operations".
Adding water data to the inventory
Now that we have our new activity categories, we add data just as we would any other. We can either do this manually or by importing. The important part is choosing an appropriate emission factor. You can choose any emission factor you see fit from our factor library or creating your own custom one, but for this example we will use gov.uk.
In the GOV.UK factor library, we will find emission factors for both "water supply" and "wastewater treatment". Expanding these allows us to both review the emission factor and create an entry right in the inventory. Doing so for both, and inputting some volumes, we will be able to view the emissions data related to water in the inventory,
and in the dashboards.
The additional activity categories and their associated data will of course also show up in generated reports, like the GHGP report (see examples below).
