COPE Occupational Health Services is committed to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2030.

Baseline Emissions Footprint
COPE began collecting emissions data in 2014 in line with our Environmental and Sustainability Policy. We began recording this in accordance with the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) requirement for our financial year starting 1st April 2020. In accordance with these requirements, we have Scope 1 and 2 emissions for two reporting years and have used the first of these years as our baseline.

Scope 1 & 2 has been reported as zero in 2020, due to our use of electric-only heating and cooling, supplied by a zero carbon provider. We transferred to new offices in May 2022 and this initially included a gas boiler, hence we expect an increase in Scope 1 emissions in 2022/2023. We are revewing the options available for the future (such as changing to a electric boiler or a more efficient gas boiler in 2023).

Scope 3 emissions includes use of a pool car, business travel, employee commuting, home working, delivery of goods to our HQ and waste processing. All Commuting and business travel was already low in 2020, due to our previous efforts in reducing this, so our more recent carbon reduction achievements may look smaller. Most of our gains were achieved between 2014 and 2019.

Baseline Year: April 2020 – March 2021
Baseline year emissions:
EMISSIONS  TOTAL (tCO2e)
Scope 1  0.00
Scope 2  0.00
Scope 3 45.50
(Included Sources) 

Waste generation: 0.22
Business travel: 20.50
Working from home: 8.25
Employee commuting: 11.55
Downstream transportation: 0.81
Clinical consumables: 2.25
Customer site OH Dept energy (estimated): 2.00

Total Emissions  45.58


Last assessment Year: April 2021 – March 2022
Lastest year emissions:
EMISSIONS  TOTAL (tCO2e)
Scope 1  0.00
Scope 2  0.00
Scope 3  42.30
(Included Sources) 

Waste generation: 0.22
Business travel: 10.75
Working from home: 12.75
Employee commuting: 13.55
Downstream transportation: 0.81
Clinical consumables: 2.25
Customer site OH Dept energy (estimated): 2.00

Total Emissions  42.33

Emissions reduction plans
Our main plan is to reduce business travel (as recorded by employee expense claims and fuel card usage). We operate a mainly virtual service, which has been increasing steadily over the last few years – thereby reducing business travel to face to face appointments. Other measures include the increasing use of virtual meetings for customer review meetings and sales meetings.

We have a homeworking policy which means most of our staff work from home, however any reduction in commuting emissions is partially offset by employee home working emissions. We have assumed a figure for home working emissions based on Energise estimates. We encourage staff to utilise energy efficient heating and zero carbon providers where possible, but this is not included in our assessment at present. It is likely that homeworking has brought about reductions in emissions than we are estimating. We are considering asking employees to provide emissions details in future, so we can more accurately gauge our true usage.

Increases in commuting and home working emissions have been caused by increasing employee numbers. This will continue to present a challenge to our emissions reduction targets, as employee headcount increased by 17.5% in the measured period.