10 Steps to Success
1: Understand your carbon footprint
Working out what you emission your business is producing, and the impact these have on the environment will help you identify your priorities. There are companies available that can help you measure your carbon footprint, create a plan to decrease it.
2: Educate employees
Your employees are essential to your business’s transition to net zero, but ensuring they are well-informed is crucial for success. To facilitate this, companies offer carbon literacy training programs. These programs are designed to educate employees on the principles and practices of carbon reduction, enabling them to understand the importance of sustainability and how they can contribute to achieving net zero goals.’
4: Energy saving
Undertaking an energy audit of your building, and installing renewable energy measures could help you identify energy saving measures that could be implemented. This will not only deliver savings in your energy bills, but will also reduce your carbon emissions. Check too that your energy supplier that your energy is coming from renewable energy sources.
5: Sustainable travel policy
Travel is one of the most carbon-producing activities within a company, yet it’s an important part of the way we do business. However, by knowing and analysing your carbon footprint generated by business travel you can identify what aspects are generating the highest emissions, and whether there is an alternative choice.
Having a sustainable travel policy that encourages employees to make modal shifts towards better transport choices can help businesses to decarbonise and reduce their carbon footprint.
Encouraging the use of public transport and discouraging single occupancy car use for offsite meetings, in tandem with salary sacrifice initiatives such as a Cycle to Work scheme should be integral for most travel policies
6. Bin ban
Small things, such as removing individual bins from under desks, can have a noticeable impact on behaviour.
Clear signage and having larger bins for recycling makes it less of an incentive for people to generate waste, but easier for them to sort it correctly.
In conjunction, encouraging staff to go paperless by removing desktop printers can all help to change habits.
7: Fleet transition
If your business has two or more company cars or vans, it could make financial sense to transition your fleet to electric or HVO.
8: Digital footprint
How often are “all staff” update emails sent to everyone in your company? Or are you copied into email threads you don’t really need to be a part of?
The research, conducted in 2019, calculated that if everyone sent just one less email a day, the “UK could reduce its carbon output by 16,433 tonnes a year” - which is the carbon equivalent of taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road!
9: Environmentally-friendly projects
Supporting your local community in implementing eco-friendly initiatives is a great way of promoting your businesses efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
10: Carbon offsetting
No matter how many green choices your company adopts, it will still be generating some amount of CO2 emissions during its activities.
Even with numerous green choices, your company will still generate some CO2 emissions through its activities. Carbon offsets provide a way to address these remaining emissions. Various options are available, ranging from company-wide programs tailored to specific sectors to initiatives targeting particular activities within your business. However, it’s important to note that carbon offsetting should complement, not replace, efforts to implement decarbonising activities and initiatives.
