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Accountants and business advisors
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Going Green - Tops tips for Greening your Business
If you are a medium to large organisation, think about offering your employees incentives to avoid individual car use. Making contributions to travel cards, carpooling schemes and bike rack and shower provision will all help to reduce the environmental burden of your organisation.
Talk to the Carbon Trust: they will carry out a free energy survey for any business spending more than £50,000 a year on energy as well as offering interest-free loans, telephone advice and information packs to smaller businesses.
Measure your energy use.
Unless you know what you’re paying, you won’t know what impact the changes make. Keep track of your bills, and how they change when you introduce our energy-saving tips.
Switch off unused equipment
The average office wastes around £6,000 each year just by leaving equipment on when there is no-one in the office. Simply getting your employees to turn off their monitors when they leave the office will make a huge difference.
Switch lights off in empty rooms
You could cut your lighting costs by as much as 15%, simply by turning off lights in unused rooms and corridors.
Don’t use more light than you need
If you’re only working in one part of the room, why not simply light the area you are working in.
Make the most of natural light
It’s free and totally carbon neutral! Position desks close to windows to make the most of daylight and avoid obstructing windows.
Don’t turn up the heating unless you really need to
Unless it’s freezing outside, try to keep your thermostat at 19°C. Every 1 degree increase on the thermostat equates to an 8% increase in your heating costs.
If your employees feel the cold, encourage them to wear warmer clothing!
Leave plenty of space around radiators
Leaving space around radiators means that the warmer air can circulate freely and it will cost you less to heat a room.
Don’t heat unused space
Storerooms, warehouses and corridors don’t need to be kept as warm as the main office areas or places where people are spending lots of time. Additionally, areas in which people are doing a lot of physical work can kept cooler.
You can also turn off or reduce the heating over the weekend, when your buildings are empty.
Keep doors and windows closed, and draught-proof, in cold weather
If employees are too hot, turn the heating down before you open the windows.
Locate the thermostat away from draughts or hot and cold spots
These will all affect the performance and accuracy of the thermostat.
Don’t put hot equipment, like photocopiers or printers near cooling vents
The cooling system will need to work harder to absorb the additional heat that these machines are creating.
Maintain your heating system
If you don’t regularly check and maintain your heating equipment, to keep it running efficiently you could be adding 10% to your heating bill.
Recycle
Waste products, be they paper, plastic and glass in an office environment or the manufacturing waste from a plant, can be recycled. Make sure all employees buy in to the system and use it effectively.
Think before you print, print double sided where possible, re-use printer paper as scrap and recycle it all eventually.
Make your communications greener
New technology helps businesses to communicate without damaging the environment through excess or unnecessary business travel. Consider web-conferencing with clients and telephone meetings with colleagues as alternate means of communication. Your travel expenses will drop and productivity will increase
Carbon-neutral travel
Use the CarbonNeutral Company's online calculator to find out how much road, rail and flight travel your business generates in terms of tonnes of carbon. You can then pay to neutralise this through investing in renewable energy and sustainable forestry projects
Introduce an environmental strategy
Set out SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed) goals that you feel the business can achieve and make sure that staff buy in and are updated regularly on progress. Staff, clients and potential customers will appreciate your efforts to take environmental issues seriously.
Find Greener Suppliers
Choosing to use environmentally friendly suppliers and products will impact on your organisation’s environmental contribution but will encourage other businesses with whom you come into contact to change their policies and practice too.
Be water-wise
Install water-saving devices in toilet cisterns and water saving taps. Monitor your water meter to check for leaks from underground and internal pipes. Also check for leaking internal pipes and dripping taps and get them fixed. Look into opportunities to recycle water and fit pressure regulators to minimise water consumption. Bear in mind that a dripping tap loses about two drops a second, which is around 90 litres a week.
Visit the following websites for further details and ideas:
www.carbontrust.co.uk
www.greenelectricity.org
www.carbonneutral.com
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