Sustainable travel is at the heart of everything we do at Wild Out. One thing was clear to us from the beginning: we wanted to understand the environmental impact of our work.

Calculating a carbon footprint is not yet obligatory for businesses like ours, but for us it has always been an important goal. If we want to support sustainable travel, we believe we should also understand our own numbers.

There are companies that offer carbon footprint calculations. Their work is very reliable — but also very expensive. For a small family business like ours, especially at the beginning, such an investment simply wasn’t possible.

Luckily, there are also tools designed for companies like ours, allowing us to do the calculations ourselves.

How did we calculate our emissions?

Business Finland, which supports the Sustainable Travel Finland certification, provides a free carbon footprint calculator for companies applying for the label. The tool is available to everyone in the STF-program and helps businesses measure their environmental impact. This calculator helps us understand our environmental impact and highlight areas of our operations where we can lower our emissions in the future.

The calculator itself is quite user-friendly, but filling it out requires time and patience. The amount of information needed depends on the type of company, the services it provides, and the materials used in everyday work.

The tool divides the company’s emissions into three main categories:

• Premises and real estate
• Logistics
• Procurement

Inside these categories there are many smaller sections where we entered more detailed information, including:

• energy sources and energy consumption
• water usage
• waste management (plastics, metals, bio waste, hazardous waste and more)
• gasoline and other fuels, as well as vehicle maintenance
• external services such as insurance, banking, IT and accounting
• purchases like hygienic products, food supplies, subscriptions and other materials

Emission Scopes

The calculator is very detailed and follows the international emission standards, including all three emission scopes:

• Scope 1 – direct emissions from our own energy use
• Scope 2 – indirect emissions from purchased energy
• Scope 3 – other indirect emissions created across the value chain

Scope 1 and 2 are emissions caused by our activities like usage of electricity, diesel fuel, water or firewood.

Scope 3 are emissions caused by other parties, but not ours direct like banking services, insurances, etc.

After collecting all the data, we were able to calculate our total emissions for the last three years.

So far, our carbon footprint looks like this:

The reason our emissions increased in 2025, is that we needed to make investments to be able to offer nature experiences year-round.

For comparison, businesses like ours usually produce between 10 and 25 tonnes of CO₂ per year, so our figures fall within that range.

Knowing our yearly emissions is already a big step. But we wanted to go further.

We started asking ourselves a different question:

What’s the carbon footprint of each program and guest?

At first, it might seem simple. You could just divide the yearly emissions by the number of guests and get a number.

But it is not that easy.

Our yearly emissions include many different activities — day trips, special programs, investments we have made, and other services that help us keep the business running. Because of that, simply dividing the total emissions by the number of guests would not give a meaningful result.

So, we went back to the same calculator and started working on more detailed calculations.

What do we know so far?

Based on our booking calendar, guests can book our programs around 200 days per year.

However, the company itself runs 365 days a year, which means that many operational costs remain even on days when no trips take place. Those costs still need to be included in the overall calculations.

When calculating the emissions for each program, we included several elements that are common to almost all of them.

Transportation

This includes diesel and other fuels used in our vehicles, insurance, maintenance costs, and amortization of the vehicle itself.

Running costs

Every business has everyday operational expenses. These include insurance, banking services, marketing, accounting, IT services and other administrative costs.

Food

All our programs include meals — sometimes a two-course or a three-course lunch, and occasionally additional snacks.

To estimate the emissions connected to food, we calculated several different menu options: vegan, vegetarian, fish, and local game meals. We then used the average emission value for our final calculation.

Preparation

Every program also requires preparation. This includes energy and water usage, cleaning, and various non-food items used during preparation.

Waste

We also estimated the waste generated during the process — including bio waste, plastic, paper, cardboard and other materials.

Some programs required additional calculations. For example, during our birdhouse workshops we also included the building materials used. In our case the wood comes from left-over or recycled sources. Because of that, we can calculate it as a negative value, which slightly reduces the overall impact.

Our calculations can be seen in the tables below (please notice that all calculations are made for maximum number of participants in the group).

Summer programs

 

 

Winter programs

 

Once we know the total emissions of a specific program, we can divide that number by the number of participants and estimate emissions.

These values are still influenced by many factors. Weather conditions play an important role — especially in Finland. During winter our vehicle consumes more fuel, and we need more electricity, wood or gas to heat the facilities.

What comes next?

Understanding our carbon footprint is only the first step.

Reducing it is a much bigger challenge. It requires knowledge, time and often financial resources. We hope that in the future we will be able to reduce the impact the most polluting parts of our operations — for example by offering transportation with a fully electric van.

For now, our focus is simple:

To use what we already have responsibly and avoid unnecessary waste.

We also believe that sustainable travel is not only about numbers and statistics. It is also about everyday choices — easy decisions made by both businesses as well as guests.

Because in the end, small steps really can lead to big changes.