Satisfy's Carbon Journey

Our Carbon Journey

Satisfy has made a lot of progress on its Carbon and Sustainability journey over the past couple of years. The Terra Nova Earth+ Workshop and the Sustainable Business Network’s Climate Basics for Business course have been pivotal in helping us on our journey. We now have a Sustainability Action Plan to help keep us accountable to our climate and sustainability goals.

Our action plan includes four focus areas and four associated goals:

Measuring our carbon impact

Food rescue generally has a positive carbon impact by reducing landfill waste and the need for additional food production, which lowers emissions. However, our operations also generate emissions.

There are currently many carbon calculators available to businesses and non-profits in New Zealand. There has also been significant international research into modelling emissions related food waste, although not much from a New Zealand perspective. For the past two years we have used Cogo to account for our emissions related to our own food rescue operations. We also made use of the Climate Action Toolbox, a free NZ government resource available to all NZ businesses and non-profits, to calculate our waste to landfill emissions. To account for the avoided emissions and water use related to the food we rescue we have utilised the ReFED Impact Calculator which Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance (AFRA) recommends using. ReFED is a not-for-profit American organisation that has developed a carbon tool specifically for the food waste supply chain, which includes food rescue. All the above tools have been utilised to calculate our environmental impact.

1,128 Tonnes

211 m Litres

Reducing our operating emissions

This year we have continued to purchase our electricity from Ecotricity, New Zealand’s first, and only, Toitū climate positive certified electricity provider. Our two electric vehicles are our preferred vans with our petrol van acting as our back-up and additional vehicle. This helps to reduce our emissions related to transport.

As we implement our Sustainability Action Plan we hope to further reduce our emissions, embed our commitment to environmental sustainability in the way that we operate and continually seek ways to improve

Carbon calculation process for 2025/26

Calculation of our operation emissions:

Ran our spend based carbon model (Cogo) to account for all items purchased by Satisfy

-> 18.29 Tonnes CO2e

Used the Climate Action Tool Box to determine our waste to landfill emissions

-> 0.13 Tonnes CO2e

Run the ReFED model for rescued food:

Substitute the ReFED downstream emissions factor for rescued food with our factor calculated from the total above.
Run the ReFED model with the new factor included using the total quantity of food Satisfy rescued in 2025/26.

Run the ReFED model for animal feed:

Run the ReFED model for animal feed using the total quantity of food Satisfy re-directed to animal feed in 2025/26.

Our data

Figure 1: Inventory of Operation Emissions by Scope

1

What are emissions by scope?
Scope 1 - Direct emissions: includes fuels used by our equipment we own.
Scope 2 - Indirect emissions: includes purchased energy like electricity.
Scope 3 - Indirect emissions: other indirect emission from our supply chain such as purchased products and services

1 Table 1: Summary of Environmental Factors for 2025/2026

Table 2: Avoided Carbon Emissions - Rescued Food

Downstream donation factor in ReFED model has been replaced by our data, i.e. the factor has been calculated from Cogo and Climate Action Tool Box totals.

2 Table 3: Avoided Carbon Emissions - Animal Feed

Table 4: Avoided Water Consumption - Rescued Food

Table 5: Avoided Water Consumption - Animal Feed