The term Carbon Neutral or Climate Neutral, refers to a company conducting its activities in a way that it compensates for all of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced on an annual basis.

Every business creates greenhouse gases as part of their day-to-day operations. The goal is to be able to measure and understand what is driving your GHG emissions, find ways to reduce them as much as possible, then offset any remaining emissions to achieve neutrality.

We have already identified several ways we can reduce the impact of our products which we look forward to sharing with you and we are exploring new opportunities all the time. An example of an change we have implemented is our cotton-to-composite sponge initiative. Phasing out 5.3 million cotton abdominal sponges and transitioning to composite is estimated to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with this product range by 212 tonnes.

Multigate use 3rd party specialists to assess our impact and guide our environmental stewardship and carbon neutrality programs.

We partnered with Lifecycles, a Melbourne based environmental management consulting company, to conduct Lifecycle Assessments (LCA) and to develop and build LCA modelling tools that help us understand and measure the impact of our products through multiple lenses (not just climate change) across their entire "cradle to grave" life cycle.

Multigate also partnered with South Pole to calculate and offset our greenhouse gas emissions in line with program boundaries and requirements set by South Pole in order for them to validate our neutrality claim and allow Multigate to use their Climate Neutral Products label for our procedure packs portfolio for FY23. 

We have recently changed our climate action partner (from South Pole to Carbon Neutral) and are currently in the process of measuring our actual impact for FY23 and revalidating our FY24 program, which we aim to have completed in the new year.

Claiming Climate Neutrality for your company operations or products is an ongoing commitment that involves you neutralising your current emissions as well as taking steps to reduce your GHG emissions over time.

Your ability to claim climate neutrality is based on a pay-it-forward system. Most companies use the impact of their previous years’ sales as the forecast for the up-and-coming year, and they pre-purchase carbon credits to offset this impact amount to achieve neutrality. This pay-it-forward investment then entitles you to claim climate neutrality for next 12 months.

When it comes time to renew your commitment, part of the assessment performed is to determine if the amount previously offset was sufficient or not. If your forecasted impact was higher than your actual impact for the period, you are entitled to deduct the additional credits already purchased against your renewal balance. If your forecasted impact was lower than your actual impact, you need to buy additional credits to make up this difference before you can renew your commitment and claim neutrality for the next 12 months.

We are currently undertaking this revalidation process with Carbon Neutral, which we are aiming to complete by November 2023. Carbon Neutral will compare our actual impact for the FY23 period, against our forecasted impact. We will account for any difference between the two, to ensure Climate Neutrality. 

Carbon credits are a universally accepted and traded currency issued by approved climate action projects that reduce, remove, or avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A project can sell 1 carbon credit for every tonne of GHG emission it can reduce, remove or avoid.

The credits are purchased and retired by individuals or companies for the purposes of offsetting Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

A prerequisite for projects issuing carbon credits is "additionality." A GHG reduction is only considered additional if it would not have occurred in the absence of a carbon credit market. If the reductions would have happened anyway, then they are not additional.

For example: you cannot purchase a piece of land with a forest on it and seek to sell its GHG emissions absorption capability as carbon credits, as the forest already existed and was already absorbing GHG emissions. To be considered additional, the forest would have needed to be planted with the express purpose being used to produce carbon credits.

By enforcing this requirement and providing financial incentive for individuals or companies to invest in these activities, additional resources that tackle climate change are created.