The route to net-zero CO2e with Science Based Targets
Sustainability is for the long haul - the dictionary definition is:
“Made in a way that causes little or no damage to the environment, and therefore able to continue for a long time.”
If you’re setting yourself up to run a business sustainably for a long time, you need to keep pushing your environmental footprint lower and lower. There’s no one-time silver (or green) bullet, only real action, thoughtful choices, and a commitment to constant improvement.
At Naked Sprout we work with the Science Based Targets initiative to keep the long-term view in mind. With their guidance we’re committed to reducing our CO2e footprint, year on year, in material ways.
What better time to review our commitments than the start of a brand new year? But what are Science-Based Targets, and why are we so proud to be verified by them?
What Is the SBTi, and how are they helping us reach net-zero?
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is an international collaboration involving CDP, the United Nations Global Compact, the World Resources Institute, and the WWF. Working together with climate scientists they research and define the best practices for reducing emissions.
They put this knowledge to work. The SBTi provides technical expertise to companies like Naked Sprout, offering tailored guidance to help us make CO2e cuts in all areas of our operations.
This means we can plan our emissions reductions in a way that will be most effective for our transport network, energy needs, and product design, as well as be part of a community of hundreds of other companies making similar changes.
At Naked Sprout, we’ve committed to science-based emissions reduction targets for both the near and long term. This means that we have a plan to get to net-zero emissions by 2040, and the SBTi has assessed and validated this plan.
We know we can do it, and we know how.
Small cores and big trains - how we reduced our footprint in 2024.
When it comes to reducing impact, small, everyday things can make all the difference. You might think things couldn’t get smaller or more everyday than inner cores of toilet paper, but in 2024 we managed to make them even smaller, shrinking the size of our cardboard tubes by 3mm.
Not a huge change, but reducing the size of the core meant our rolls of toilet paper have become smaller overall, which meant we could shrink our boxes. Smaller boxes mean we can fit more products per shipment, so fewer trips to get our boxes from our factory to our warehouse. In 2023 we could fit 42 of our larger boxes of toilet rolls on a standard pallet, now we can fit 60 of them.
In 2024, we also introduced electrified rail transport into our logistics. Rail is already one of the greenest ways to move goods, and switching to electric takes it up a notch! Our tissue products are made in our wonderful B Corp tissue factory, in Northern Spain. From the Spring of 2024 the European leg of the journey, all the way from Northern Spain to Northern France, was made by electrified rail.
Changes like this keep us ahead of the curve, finding real, measurable ways of reducing our impact that we account for in our detailed Life Cycle Assessments. We like to be creative and we’ll consider any efficiency or environmental savings that might work! One thing we won’t do, however, is offsetting.
Why we don't make "carbon neutral" toilet paper
You’ve probably heard of carbon offsetting. Lots of eco brands proudly advertise that they are carbon neutral and it was a subject of huge controversy at the recent COP29 summit in Azerbaijan.
The idea is simple: pay to cancel out your emissions by funding projects like tree planting or renewable energy. The problem is that there’s no good evidence it works or the time-frame it would work on.
We’ve talked at length about the problems with offsetting elsewhere on our blog. The long and short of it is that leading climate scientists believe widespread offsetting may be doing more harm than good, and we agree with them.
The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has been in discussions about whether or not to allow companies to include offsetting as a way of reducing their emissions. Discussions continued all through 2024 and the final decision was postponed until 2025.
We’re hoping the SBTi decides against offsetting as a get-out-of-jail-free card for companies who aren’t willing to do the work to make material CO2e reductions. To stop the current warming of our planet, companies need to cut emissions at the source, not try to pay their way out of the problem with offsetting.
It’s why we don’t offset at Naked Sprout, and when we work with suppliers that do we add their calculated emissions right back into our total.
Eco toilet paper backed by Science-Based Targets
For us, validating our targets with the SBTi wasn’t just about ticking a box—it was about holding ourselves to the highest standard, doing the work that creates real change.
We last posted about Science Based Targets in August 2023. Back then there were 5000 companies taking action with the initiative. Today there are nearly 10,000!
We’re proud to be the only UK-based eco brand in our sector with SBTi-validated targets and we hope to see more UK brands following suit. In August this year Swedish powerhouse Essity, makers of some of Europe’s most popular tissue products, also had their targets validated, so we’re in good company.
Hopefully more toilet roll manufacturers will join us; if we’re going to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5% we need all hands on deck.
Soft toilet paper with solid targets
2025 will be the fifth year that Naked Sprout has been in operation. If there’s one thing we’ve learned so far it’s that sustainability is much more about persistence than about perfection.
Working with the Science Based Targets initiative gives us real, practical steps that we can take to reduce our CO2e emissions as we chase that route to zero. Beyond this, we hope that it inspires other companies to do the same.
Whether it’s rethinking transporting by train, taking a stand on offsetting, or setting science-backed goals, we’re in it for the long haul.
Want to join us?
