Our Carbon Journey
Our Carbon Journey
Satisfy has made a lot of progress on its carbon and sustainability journey over the past twelve months.
Following on from the Terra Nova Earth+ Workshop that Phillipa and Stef attended in May 2024, Cameron and Phillipa have completed the Sustainable Business Network’s Climate Basics for Business course in the first half of 2025. This course encouraged us to dig deeper into how we can track our carbon emissions and reductions, and helped us draft our first Sustainability Action Plan.
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.
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In previous years we used a model created for Satisfy in 2016 by a group of University of Canterbury students that attempted to reflect NZ conditions for carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions reduction and water (H2O) reduction in relation to food rescue. However, we have been aware for a while that this model needed reviewing and updating.
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Our 2016 environmental model was built around attempting to understand the full life cycle of food production and its associated environmental impacts - most notably carbon equivalent emissions (carbon dioxide and methane gas) and water use. It took into consideration the water footprint required to grow the food and the carbon emissions related to growing, producing and transporting food to its retail destination. This was used instead of just looking at the impact of food waste breaking down in landfill, which is just one piece of the puzzle. However, our 2016 model did not include Satisfy’s own operation emissions which makes up another important part of rescued food’s full life cycle carbon footprint.
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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. To start accounting for our emissions related to our own food rescue operations, last year we started using Cogo, a spend based carbon footprint calculator. This year we have 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.
1,063 Tonnes
184 m Litres
Reducing our operating emissions
This year we have continued to purchase our electricity from Ecotricity, New Zealand’s first, and only, ToitÅ« 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 2024/25
Calculation of our operation emissions:
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Ran our spend based carbon model (Cogo) to account for all items purchased by Satisfy
-> 21.60 Tonnes CO2e
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Used the Climate Action Tool Box to determine our waste to landfill emissions
-> 0.16 Tonnes CO2e
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Run the ReFED model for rescued food:
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Substitute the ReFED downstream emissions factor for rescued food with our factor calculated from the total above.
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Run the ReFED model with the new factor included using the total quantity of food Satisfy rescued in 2024/25.
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Run the ReFED model for animal feed:
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Run the ReFED model for animal feed using the total quantity of food Satisfy re-directed to animal feed in 2024/25.
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Our data
Figure 1: Inventory of Operation Emissions by Scope
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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
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Table 1: Summary of Environmental Factors for 2024/2025
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.
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Table 3: Avoided Carbon Emissions - Animal Feed
Table 4: Avoided Water Consumption - Rescued Food
Table 5: Avoided Water Consumption - Animal Feed
