Business for Good

On becoming a certified B Corporation

By Ella Weldon AND ROLAND HARWOOD

We are excited to share that Liminal has officially become a certified B Corporation. We are proud to stand amongst a cohort of over 4000 companies that recognise the role and responsibility of business in being part of the solution to our greatest social and environmental challenges. 

We are aware that this initial certification is only as meaningful as the impact that Liminal makes in the years to come, and so we are looking forward to using this as a springboard to keep improving.

Having said that, we like to think we’ve always been a BCorp at heart but now we’re pleased to also have the certification to make it official. 

You can now see our profile listed in the BCorp company directory here.

So What?

The BCorp movement has grown massively over the last few years. In the last year alone, the community in the UK has grown by over 80% and we've welcomed 330 businesses to the UK B Corp Community, reaching 56 industries with over 40,000 employees. As the profile of the certification grows, it is also attracting more attention including, quite rightly in our view, some questions over some of the bigger companies getting certified as BCorp.

For example Nespresso was recently granted BCorp status which was not well received by many existing BCorps and you can read a bit more about that here. We are not close enough to that specific decision to say definitively whether that is right or wrong, even though at first glance it certainly looks surprising. However what we would say is that it’s important for a movement like this to successfully breakthrough into the mainstream, that it is not merely just about smaller companies but also includes the whole economy including larger companies, and so we hope that other large companies will want to join the community and be willing to make the changes necessary to achieve BCorp status.

What’s Next?

We got over 100 points out of a possible total of 140 (with the minimum threshold is 80) which we’re told is pretty high. And yet the area where we scored the fewest points is in our Environmental impact which is a concern given our increasingly laser like focus on climate action and innovation. 

So in response to that, we are working with a few other organisations to help us figure out what we do about that, including Ecologi with whom we are a beta tester of their new Zero product which assesses our emissions based on our financial transactions. This has shown us that over 98% of our emissions are scope 3 (namely they come from our suppliers suppliers i.e. we have no direct control over these, often huge, organisations).

In addition we recently joined TechZero (the climate action group for tech companies of all sizes) who made us aware of a good guide to tackling scope 3 emissions by Leaders for Climate Action, so that’s the next thing on our radar to implement as soon as possible.

In summary we are pleased to have reached the milestone of having become a BCorp but know that this is the start of journey, not an end, and look forward to being part of a transition towards business being a force for good in the world.

Get in touch.

If you would like to find out more or explore how you can work with or for a business for good, then we please get in touch via hello@weareliminal.co and let’s talk.