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Inside the new Brand Emissions Estimator

Sarah Shoemaker
February 15, 2022
The new Brand Emissions Estimator (BEE) offers businesses of any size an effective alternative to expensive carbon accounting systems. It's the most accessible, efficient and effective way to measure your brand's emissions.
The new Brand Emissions Estimator (BEE) offers businesses of any size an effective alternative to expensive carbon accounting systems. It's the most accessible, efficient and effective way to measure your brand's emissions.

Welcome to the new Brand Emissions Estimator (BEE)

We created the BEE two years ago so that companies looking to become Climate Neutral Certified would have a free, self-service option for standardized and rigorous carbon measurement. It's designed to be an accessible starting point, quickly using simple financial data to output a cradle-to-consumer emissions estimate in just a few moments.

After companies produce a simple estimate, they can license or certify to refine the output from the BEE. This refinement uses company data about purchases, physical inventory, and operating decisions to sharpen the business' carbon inventory. It's an efficient and effective way to get started, without draining resources and budget from the actual climate-impacting work of removing, avoiding, and reducing emissions.

The BEE is tested and proven, with nearly 350 companies completing carbon measurement on the BEE as part of becoming Climate Neutral Certified. Now we're expanding both its functionality accessibility for companies starting their climate action journey.

What's new on the BEE

After a busy winter of development, we're very excited to share some extremely impactful updates in the latest version of the BEE: 

  1. An updated emission factor library
    Emission factors are numbers we apply to company data to produce carbon emissions. These factors are produced by experts who study the lifecycle of products and activities. We license emission factors from several sources and we update our emission factor library regularly to stay current with the best science. Users now have access to more factors that capture the range of products they really buy. This has been especially important in quantifying the impact of organic or recycled materials. 
  1. An improved data input workflow
    Every company we’ve ever worked with in the BEE keeps their data in spreadsheets. To simplify the workflow of measurement, we launched an integration with Google Sheets. Now companies can drop data into templates built in Sheets and then sync many rows at a time back into the BEE. This is a huge improvement from form fields, which required the user to come to the tool with already annualized numbers. This has been a game changer. Companies no longer need to do onerous scratch work offline. Instead, they can use the synced Google Sheet as a template, where they simply drop in their data. With one click, all of that data is pushed back into their carbon inventory. 
  1. A new user experience
    This integration with Google Sheets necessitated a different way of thinking about how you move through the BEE. We built a new UX to guide users through the experience of adding data through their synced sheet and then assessing it against the estimates from the BEE. Our users have enjoyed the guided measurement experience, making the process feel achievable and…
  1. New data visualization
    The user experience culminates in a review screen or a dashboard where users can visualize their emissions, quickly seeing the largest drivers and areas of their operations where improvements can drive the greatest change. 
  1. Back-end calculation speed enhancements
    Lastly, all of these require far more horsepower. We cleaned up calculations and everything is working pretty quick – you can push thousands of rows of data into the BEE with much faster speeds. 

BEE 3.0 Overview

Why does this matter?

These features have been critical to our current certification cycle, with more than 400 companies now measuring their carbon emissions. Having a self-service option for carbon accounting allows Climate Neutral to serve more companies and to expand our non-profit impact more quickly. 

We believe that an accessible, nonprofit tool for measuring and managing corporate carbon emissions can drive significant impact. In an increasingly crowded landscape of software options for carbon accounting, the BEE stands out as a low-cost option that enables rapid measurement, offers insights, and becomes the basis for planning immediate decarbonization actions. 

Every dollar not spent on fancy measurement software can be a dollar invested into solutions that directly decarbonize the atmosphere. Our hope is that the BEE can allow companies to measure faster, and more simply, and then get on to paying for climate solutions. 

Start measuring your emissions today.

If you work for a company and you haven’t already, estimate your carbon emissions. It's the only way to get started, and it's why we make BEE estimation free to anyone who wants to use it. Ready to go further? Purchase a license or go through the Climate Neutral Certified process to refine your BEE estimate with product and purchase data to sharpen your carbon measurement.

Get started with the BEE today.

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About the Author

Sarah Shoemaker

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