A: You can submit a footprint for any year for which you have data.

A: Yes, it is always possible to modify or delete data. Even after a footprint has been submitted, you can still edit or delete it by going to the “Footprints” tab in the “Data” section of the Tools, and then clicking “Edit”.

A: Always try your best to make your footprints as complete as possible. However, if you are unable to fill in certain sections because either you don’t have access to the data, or they do not apply to you, it is perfectly acceptable to leave them blank. Whenever feasible, fill in the “Notes” field at the bottom of the tab with some context or extra information. It helps us to understand your situation better, and it also helps us improve the Tools over time!

A: The CG Tools ask for data on full-time equivalent (FTE) employees; not specifically full-time employees. Do your best to estimate how many FTEs you have, on average (e.g. 2 part-time employees would represent 1 full-time employee).

A: You can contact your landlord or building manager and request the utility bills for the entire building. From here, you can apportion the energy and/or water consumption data to the percentage of the building’s floor area that you occupy. For example, if your space is 1,000 ft2 and the total floor area of the building is 10,000 ft2, you would calculate 10% of the total annual consumption of the building and enter that number into the Tools. If you do this, you can check the “Please check the box if data has been apportioned to floor area” box on the “General” tab to give us more context about your situation.

A: That depends. If your organization is the owner and/or leaseholder for a building and you manage the space year-round, you should create a “Building” footprint and include an entire year’s worth of data, even if you are not presenting work the entire year. If you are not the owner/leaseholder of the building and you only rent it for individual productions, you should create a “Project” footprint and only include data for the period(s) of time during which your productions are taking place (including rehearsals).

A: Unfortunately, we don’t have an option yet for well water in the Tools. However, you can make a note of this in the “Notes” field of the “Water” tab to give us more context about your situation.

A: It is uncommon for organizations in Quebec to receive water bills. If you are in Montreal, you can call or email the department (City of Montreal Water Services ; mesureau@ville.montreal.qc.ca) to access your building's water meter readings and then estimate your annual water consumption by taking two readings in a particular year, calculating the daily rate of consumption between these two readings, and prorating this amount for an entire year, if your organization is not listed on the local land registry, your landlord may have to request this information. Other municipalities in Quebec may have similar systems. If you are unsure, call your local water services department and ask about your building’s water consumption. If your organization rents a space in a larger building, you can apply the same principle that you used for your energy consumption and apportion your water consumption to the floor area of your space.

A: The "Business Travel" section was initially created to be used for all employee and business travel except for daily commuting, and thus it is not a necessity that you input commuting data. However, if users want to know the impacts of their employees’ daily commutes, they are more than welcome to use this tab for that purpose. In this case, it’s best to use the “Journey description” boxes to delineate which inputs are attributed to which activities.

A: When inputting data about car travel, simply enter the number of vehicle kilometers that were driven as the number of people in the car will have a minimal impact on the carbon footprint of that trip.

A: Every footprint you create under your organization’s account will sum up for each year of operations. If you would like to indicate that two or more footprints are attributed to the same project or building (For example, if you want to include a specific impact in your footprint, but that tab is not available in the type of footprint you’re creating, so you create a new footprint to include that impact), make sure you name your footprints accordingly so that it is clear they are connected. However, it is not currently possible to visualize multi-footprint data on the platform, except for the graphs that aggregate all the footprints in one reporting year.

A: Discharge lighting refers to lighting sources that use some form of High Intensity Discharge lamp. If you're not in lighting design, you might know these as more industrial fixtures like street lamps (where they aren't LED). In theatrical use, we might use Metal Halide Discharge lamps or an HMI (Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide) because they produce full spectrum white light. They are also common in moving lights, which have various filters, shutters, gobos, and effects built in, and each of these things might reduce the brightness, and provide the brightest source. However, discharge lights aren't dimmable. They are dimmed using a mechanical louvre. So even when a moving light or another big discharge light is not emitting light it is still drawing its maximum power and thus we classify them differently.

A: If you have substantial portions of the event that are inside and substantial portions outside, it's probably easiest to separate them into two footprints as it will just be easier to track that way. Although, if one portion is just small, maybe you can pick the type of footprint that most closely aligns. If that’s the case, we suggest also making a note that you do have an outside or inside component as well.