Sustaxo: Sustainability assessment to support company’s business decisions

Problem

Companies today do not have practical tools or databases to assess their business activities’ impacts. In Estonia only 27% of companies have invested in adapting to climate change, while the average in the European Union is 43%, making Estonian companies being far behind the European average in addressing environmental and climate impacts.

Sustaxo has created a practical and simple tool for small and medium-sized companies to assess their environmental impact and adjust their business strategy accordingly, putting more effort on increasing positive effects on the environment.

Experiment solution

A common metric for mapping climate impacts is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and although the taxonomy of sustainable financing is directly applicable to large companies and market participants in the financial sector, they cannot assess their compliance and impact without increasing the awareness and the ability to assess the impact of their clients and partners.

Therefore, the assessment of environmental sustainability is important for a small and medium-sized company, for example when applying for a loan and in the conditions of a loan offer, as well as when participating in the procurement process as a service provider. We developed a self-assessment solution for small and medium-sized service sector companies.

With the Sustaxo solution, we create an assessment of the extent of environmental impacts based on the data of a specific company. The assessment can be presented to the cooperation partners or financiers of the company and it enables them to plan the company’s business activities accordingly. As the primary result of the self-assessment we show for example, the energy intensity per service, the footprint related to the company’s workplace and the effects of employees’ commuting to work and business trips.

In order to calculate the assessment, we ask the company for basic data on the activities that affect the environment, such as the amounts of energy consumption, waste generation and the amounts of fuel used in vehicles.

Impact

Our goal is to create the region’s largest data warehouse of climate impact assessment results to provide comparative data across other companies and industries, which in turn helps the company position itself compared to others. At the moment, the platform provides general recommendations for moving towards sustainability, but the next goal is to provide more specific recommendations based on the company’s current situation.

Another major goal is to create a network of support services that would help companies to reduce their negative environmental impact. For example, the consultation could be helpful for every small and medium-sized company – awareness of its position compared to other similar companies and possible changes to be made. The goal would be to make these activities easily manageable for the company, so that green turn does not remain just a keyword, but can be equipped with specific practical activities for each company.

The Sustaxo web application is already available to entrepreneurs, and we are waiting for small and medium-sized companies to assess their environmental impact!