Tracking Our Impact
Verdical Group’s Annual Carbon Footprint Reporting
By Cassiel Nortier-Tilly
Verdical Group’s mission is to decarbonize the built environment, and wouldn’t it be strange to ask our clients to measure and reduce something we don’t measure ourselves? With this in mind each year, our team assembles a spreadsheet, a folder of receipts, and a set of employee surveys to determine exactly how much carbon the company put into the atmosphere and identify strategies for reducing that impact the following year. Verdical Group is also a certified B Corporation and a member of both the B Corp Climate Collective and The Climate Pledge, and committed to reaching net zero by 2030. Those commitments only mean something if there is a number behind them. Measuring our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions is how we determine whether our reduction policies are working and how we know how much to offset each year to achieve net zero or net positive status. This year, we have continued to adapt the calculation itself, because where our work happens has changed over the years as well.
Our Carbon Footprint Calculation
We use the standard three-scope structure that most GHG accounting protocols follow.
Scope 1 Direct Emissions: This scope covers on-site natural gas combustion at our office locations. We take each building’s total therms, calculate our share by square footage, and apply the U.S. EPA emissions factor of 53.06 kg CO₂ per mmBTU.
Scope 2 Indirect Emissions from Purchased Energy: Last year, this scope measured the electricity we drew from our office buildings, and the energy our team used at home sat further down the page under Scope 3. This year, Scope 2 is now the electricity each employee draws where they actually work, which for nearly all of us is at home.
Scope 3 Other Indirect Emissions: Our third scope covers a broader range of indirect emissions from our operations.
- Commuting and business travel: Our team’s work-related travel, including commutes to the office and client site visits, calculated trip by trip.
- Waste: Emissions from waste generated by our staff.
- Procurement: The embodied carbon of items ordered and shipped to employees, including emissions from their production and transportation. This means working through every receipt for the year.
What We Changed This Year
Almost no one at Verdical Group works from a company office anymore, and those who do use one only a few days a year. Our previous Scope 2 approach still estimated the electricity we would have consumed in shared office spaces based on square footage, an assumption that had grown less representative every year since 2020. So, this year we switched them.
Work-from-home energy is no longer an addendum to Scope 3. It is our Scope 2, and because it now carries that weight, we rebuilt how it is calculated. Rather than one estimate per household, we now account for a proportional share of each person’s home energy footprint, scaled from the whole home down to the home office, and the energy each workstation draws, based on the number and type of laptops and monitors, hours worked, and video conferencing hours, which consume more energy than passive computer use. Each employee’s kilowatt-hours were then converted to CO₂e using their own utility’s Power Content Label rather than a generic grid average.
The difference these changes made was substantial. Two colleagues working identical hours on identical equipment can carry home office footprints that differ by a factor of forty, based solely on what is feeding the outlet. In the most recently published Power Content Labels from 2024, PG&E’s mix was 98% free of greenhouse gas emissions, whereas SDG&E had a much more fossil-fuel heavy mix.
Scope 1 is the one place our method has not changed. We do not yet have a reliable way to isolate the natural gas each of us burns at home during working hours, so our Scope 1 figure still only reflects an estimate from our office locations. We know the home portion is not zero, and finding a defensible way to capture it is on our list for next year.
Our 2025 Results
Our total 2025 carbon footprint was approximately 31 metric tons of CO₂e, roughly equivalent to seven gasoline-powered cars driven for one year. That is an increase of about four metric tons over 2024, driven by two things: we traveled more – business air travel alone accounted for more than half of our total footprint – and our rebuilt Scope 2 method captured emissions our previous approach never examined.
Our team changed shape over the year as well. Five new employees joined our team during the year: we closed 2025 with 21 people living across the country. The company also grew. Verdical Group was named to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America in 2025, and our service area expanded with it. In particular, our commissioning work increased, and commissioning means being physically present in buildings and, therefore, increased travel-related carbon emissions.
One category of emissions moved in the other direction: In last year’s report we committed to prioritizing essential purchases and limiting expendable items, and as a result, procurement emissions came down roughly 15% over the year!
Our Takeaways
Our footprint is a travel footprint. For a consultancy of our size, air travel is the dominant variable and every other category is comparatively marginal. That tells us precisely where carbon reduction efforts belong.
Remote work did not eliminate our emissions. It redistributed them. Electric demand moved into 21 homes across multiple utility territories, and on our own ledger it moved from a footnote in Scope 3 to a scope of its own. Had we not followed it there, we would have reported a smaller and less complete number.
An increase is not automatically a setback. Part of this year’s growth reflects improved measurement and part reflects a larger team able to deliver more positive impact through our work!
Growth and footprint currently move together. More projects mean greater positive impact for our clients and higher emissions for us. The task ahead is to decouple the two rather than to overlook the relationship.
As we have every year since 2021, we purchased carbon offsets covering our full 2025 footprint plus additional credits to maintain Verdical Group’s net positive status. This year that meant 31 carbon offsets were purchased through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. These offsets support the Ningxia Xiangshan Wind Farm in China. We also purchased 1,000 gallons of Water Restoration Certificates, improving water at the Jordan River Restoration Project in Utah, to account for our team’s use of artificial intelligence since we began using it. Understanding our impact is only worth doing if we act on it, and offsetting what we have not yet reduced is part of that work.
Ideas for Next Year
Waste is where Scope 2 was a year ago: this category is describing an office almost none of us regularly occupy. Next year, our team is planning to conduct a voluntary home-office waste audit. This would include a sample group of team members measuring the amount and type of waste their home office actually generates over a month, then extrapolating our findings across the company. It would be less precise than a utility bill but considerably closer to accuracy than our current method.
Calculating Your Carbon Footprint
We encourage anyone interested in carbon accounting to give it a try. It may seem complex and daunting, but you do not need a software platform or an outside consultant to begin. We do this in a spreadsheet, with publicly available emission factors and short employee surveys. The hardest part is not the arithmetic. It is committing to look, and then committing to act on what you find.
The references we use to complete these calculations are public and free of charge, including: the U.S. EPA GHG Emission Factors Hub, Zero Tool for home energy estimates, California’s utility Power Content Labels, EPA WARM for waste impact, NFPA 101 occupant load factors for office space assumptions, and the Green Element and Compare Your Footprint remote-working methodology published in 2021.
Still stuck? Verdical Group offers carbon accounting support services, including footprint audits and corporate sustainability plans to help your firm track and reduce emissions. Contact us today to learn more!
