IMPACT REPORT 2021 People Planet Profit
Table of Contents
2 3 5 7 9 11
17 21 23
Impact United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Focus Areas for Copernicus Affordable and Clean Energy Decent Work and Economic Growth Responsible Consumption and Production Climate Action - Carbon Offsets - Net Zero 2030 Life on Land - Trees For Schools Giving Back - Educator Thank You Program B Corp Recertification
Copernicus Wetlands, Quebec, Canada
What does impact mean to Copernicus? As a company, we have an adverse impact on our environment due to the manufacturing of our products. Therefore, we must do what we can to find a balance between what is best for our business and what is best for our planet and people.
Page 2
United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals The majority of global challenges and solutions are described using the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Their aim is to achieve these goals by 2030 worldwide. We have connected them to our own goals at Copernicus to do our part in creating effective solutions.
Focus Areas for Copernicus All 17 UN SDGs are important but they do not all apply to our company, so we have chosen to focus on five applicable goals:
Affordable and Clean Energy Decent Work and Economic Growth Responsible Consumption and Production Climate Action Life on Land
Page 4
Affordable and Clean Energy: Ensure access to affordable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Solar Energy
In the past few years, we installed solar panels at a vendor facility in China as well as our facility in Canada. The facility in China is now powered with approximately 100% solar energy and our facility in Canada is powered with approximately 10% solar energy. We focused on China since a fair amount of their energy comes from coal, unlike Canada. In 2022, in China, we hope to work with other vendors to assist them in installing solar panels on their facilities as well. In Canada, we are also tying our solar panels into the public electricity grid. This means if our batteries become full and we are not requiring power, such as on the weekend when we are not in the facility, we send any excess energy our solar panels create back to the public grid instead of losing it.
Energy Efficiency
Creating an energy efficient building can save a lot of unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, we are working on making improvements to our existing building by adding more insulation, installing heat pumps, and numerous other projects to improve energy efficiency.
Renewable Energy Carbon Offsets
This year we have focused on making our carbon offset strategy more diverse, including purchasing carbon offsets that provide renewable energy to low-income communities. See Carbon Offsets on page 14.
Page 5
Vendor facility, China
Goal: Replace our propane
heating system with
a non-greenhouse gas producing system by 2025.
Decent Work and Economic Growth: Provide sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. Volunteer
Our staff volunteered a total of 167.5 hours in 2021! This included activities such as baking for local youth shelters, growing food in community gardens for low-income families, writing notes to seniors, youth mentoring, Christmas hamper programs, and planting trees for forest restoration projects.
Page 7
30
different professional development courses were taken by our staff in 2021
students employed - helps with youth employment issues and skills training in our local community
100% of full-time employees receive profit sharing
27
100%
of employees are paid a living wage
>50% of work force is female
Responsible Consumption and Production: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
Page 9
Packaging
Plastic packaging is a global dilemma and is a critical issue. We are extremely close to our goal of reaching 100% plastic-free packaging! We are set to reach this goal in mid-2022.
Products
In 2019, we started working to measure the greenhouse gas emissions impact of our products. To start, we compared two similarly built easels that are made with two very different materials – steel and bamboo. Steel requires the burning of coal in its production whereas bamboo sequesters carbon as it grows. But how much better is bamboo as a material quantitatively? We determined that every time a bamboo easel is purchased over a steel easel, we save approximately 36 kg of CO2e, which is equivalent to saving 147 km or 91 mi of driving.
This is an estimation with some assumptions. For instance, we did not measure the individual emissions for every material used to make our whiteboards. We hope to refine this measurement in 2022 and measure more of our products. Knowing that bamboo is a much better material in terms of greenhouse gas emissions led to the decision to expand our bamboo line. We are launching four additional bamboo products in 2022.
Goal:
Reduce our upstream product-specific
emissions by 50% by 2025 Masks
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we require our employees to wear medical grade face masks to keep our team as safe as possible. Unfortunately, medical masks are not recyclable in municipal recycling centers, so we found a reuse program through Green Circle Salons. Our masks are now taken to be sanitized, broken down, and made into new masks.
Climate Action: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. We participated in the Green Economy Canada pilot project alongside other small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Ontario entitled “SME Net-Zero Pathways: Manufacturing” to measure our carbon footprint and to identify potential greenhouse gas emission reduction opportunities. We are using a Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Value Chain Accounting and Reporting Standard to measure our carbon footprint. The standard includes three scopes businesses use to measure their metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2e) across all of their business activities. Here is how our base year, 2019 compares to 2021 and the status of our assessment to date.
Scope 1 are any direct emissions from sources that are owned/controlled by Copernicus, mainly heating our facility 2019 Scope
2021 Scope
78.5 Mt CO2e
78.2 Mt CO2e
Scope 2 are any indirect emissions from purchased electricity 2019 Scope
2021 Scope
3.5 Mt CO2e
4.3 Mt CO2e
Scope 3 are any indirect emissions from our operations or supply chain, the majority being from the products we manufacture 2019 Scope
2021 Scope
Approx. 5910 Mt CO2e
Being measured
This gives us a total of approximately 5992 Mt CO2e for the year of 2019. Measuring is an important first step, but the next step is to use those measurements to set science-based targets for reducing those emissions. Page 11
Goal:
We commit to reducing absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 from a 2019 base year, and to measure and reduce Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. This is in line with the United Nations target to hold temperature rise at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and is advised by Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as an approachable goal for SMEs.
Example of a Solar Cooker
Page 13
Carbon Offsets
As we measure and reduce our carbon emissions, we still want to be balancing the amount of carbon we are producing, which we do by buying carbon offsets. Our criteria for offset projects includes retiring their offsets when purchased, having a long-term plan, and transparency of fund use. Buying offsets is not the solution to climate change, but it is a helpful step as we work on reducing our carbon emissions.
5762 Mt CO2e offset in 2021
36%
From Land Use Protection Projects
41%
From Renewable Energy Projects
Carbon Offset Projects Purchased From: • Heqing, China Solar Cooker Project • Russas-Valparaiso Tropical Forest Conservation Project • Sichuan, China Biogas Digester Project • Peru Deforestation Protection Project • Katingan, Indonesia Peatland Protection Project • Kolanupaka, Telangana Solar Power Plant Project
24%
From Other Community-Based Projects
Laura Gallant, BC, Canada
Net Zero 2030 We have also joined over 1600 other companies in committing to the B Corp Climate Collective Net Zero 2030. This means we are committing to achieving net zero emissions by 2030 as a company. We commit to reduce emissions wherever possible and what we cannot reduce any further, we will use verified carbon offsets to cover (see previous page).
Page 16
Life on Land Land Conservation This is an extremely important issue to us at Copernicus. Since 2009, we have placed a large focus on tree planting and land conservation as a company.
Goal: 1000 acres protected by 2022
1430 acres protected in total This includes a 188-acre property that has not been logged in over 70 years. With our protection, it will not be logged and continue providing wildlife habitat. This will allow the older trees to continue sequestering carbon and allowing the forest to mature into an old growth. In addition to these acres, we also assisted Nature Conservancy Canada in protecting 20,000 acres on Manitoulin Island as well as an island on the Ottawa River which is being donated back to Indigenous people.
Page 17
Deforestation, BC, Canada
“Progress has been made towards sustainable forest management but the world has lost 100 million hectares of forest in two decades.” – United Nations
Trees for Schools We were able to donate 4,660 trees and 1,340 wildflower seed packets on Earth Day 2021 even with the Ontario school closures occurring in April due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We could not have done it without the help of our own dedicated staff here at Copernicus, our nursery partner, all of the hard-working teachers, and our local community members.
4,660 trees 1,340 flowers 193,425 trees since 2009
Page 20
Giving Back At Copernicus, we are passionate about conscious business. We want to lead by example, and giving back to our community, both locally and globally, is fundamental to our company culture. Giving Strategy In 2021, we donated $176,350 to charities in three main criteria: Environmental Education, Community and Environmental Conservation.
65%
Some of the organizations we support 10%
25% Environmental Conservation Environmental Education Community
125 Copernicus products donated
41 supplies donated
12 DonorsChoose projects supported
Educator Thank You Program We started our Educator Thank You program because we know that educators give their all to their students, especially in these last couple years. We constantly hear stories of teachers going above and beyond to help their students thrive. To assist teachers, we hold a monthly draw for $250 that they can use towards classroom supplies, their DonorsChoose project, or a Copernicus product. We also draw an additional winning teacher each month from the entire submissions list to receive a free Copernicus product. We also give away products when we see the need to deserving schools and not-for-profit organizations.
Page 22
B Corp Recertification Being a B Corporation means a lot to us. We aim to truly embrace the mantra of using business as a force for good! We can’t believe we have already been a B Corp for three years now, which means 2021 was the year we came up for recertification. In our very first certification in 2018, we received a score of 80.5, just squeaking by the required 80. This time around, we received a score of 82.5 and have already set goals for ourselves to increase this score once again on our next recertification by focusing on each area: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, Customers
2018 score: 80.5 2021 score: 82.5
Page 24
“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make.” - Jane Goodall
Canada 8194 County Road 109, R.R. #3, Arthur, ON N0G 1A0 e: info@copernicused.com w: www.copernicused.com t: 1 800 267 8494 or 519 848 3664 f: 1 519 848 5516 Copernicus reserves the right to change or modify pricing and products specifications with or without prior notification. Illustrations and descriptions may not be exactly as shown. No part may be reproduced by any means without prior authorization of Copernicus Educational Products Inc. All rights reserved. 2022©