Going carbon neutral

Greenfield is a training company working in the public and not for profit sector and went carbon neutral 12 months ago. To do this we had to look at all aspects of our business, calculate our carbon footprint and look at various ways to reduce it, which isn’t as difficult as it sounds – there are tools and organisations out there to help you for free.

Why did we do it? Ethical reasons to one side, we run a business and the great thing about doing this in the workplace is that by making changes to being environmentally friendly we would save money and increase profit margins.

What we did

The biggest problem for us was that we work nationally with 20 associates spread throughout the country. So we changed our business model  and re-organised our associates into two regional teams, with the same skills sets in each region – and as most of our competitors are one person bands who could more easily cut their costs, the fact that we had less travel and hotel costs meant our prices became more competitive – and so more contracts.

The Directors also make much more journeys by public transport and have cut our car mileage by 1000 miles per month and run one 1000cc Daihatsu car between the directors - one of the least environmentally damaging cars when we bought it.

 We then looked at our office processes

            We recycle 95% of our waste

            95% of business mail is sent electronically – invoices, brochures etc –

we now send out 1 / 2 pieces of post a day compared to 20/30

in the past £1200/£1500 savings a year, which I think most small business could do with

            Sources environmentally friendly products – paper / Fairtrade etc

            Scrap paper is used for printing internally

            All documents are printed double sided and as a training company we

            do lots of handouts that has also cut our prices – although we still

            charge the customer the =same as they are still getting the same

            amount of information

            Equipment is switched on only when needed and always switched off

at the end of a day so saving electricity – in our case not a huge

amount but if we were a bigger company perhaps with a few

offices the savings could mount up

Doing all that we still could not be totally carbon neutral and have had to offset this by donations to Trees for life and giving free training to environment groups on presentation skills to help them put their cases over more effectively. We give 1% of each invoice to offsetting. The actual figure is only 1/4 % but that seemed a bit mean!

What we achieved

Doing this we became the first Carbon Neutral Training company and won a National Green Apple Environment award and 2 Regional Environmental awards in 2007 and finalist in another regional award

Training Journal ran a 3 page feature on us. Our story has been picked up by many publications locally and nationally. Our profile has really risen.

Daihatsu want to do a spread on us as buying one of their cars was part of our green plan.

What are the benefits

And how has this affected our business

Ò  We are getting known for being the green training company – getting our name in front of our clients

Ò  More web enquiries – quite a number using green/environment in the search phrase

Ò  Will definitely help in tender (50% of our work comes through tenders) as it is an area you must fulfil and more organisations are asking for more than just your policy, but are asking what actions you are taking. And this is marked as part of proposal assessment

Ò  As we work exclusively in the public sector who all have environmental policies and targets which will become stricter – they like M&S will have to ensure their supplier chain is also green

Ò  We have had a number of request to provide environmental training and are researching this market at present but with organisations like Enworks and ground work amongst others offering services for free we would struggle to make a profit

Ò  The publicity we are getting means we are getting known in the private sector as well as the public and may mean we can launch some of our trainings into the private sector

Being a carbon neutral training company is a good tag when more and more people are looking for greener companies. Many companies are now jumping on the bandwagon – some out of belief, some as a monetary decision.

Even if you don’t believe in climate change, the savings you can make to increase your profit through looking at energy, waste, water usage etc makes it a good choice and the increased marketing visibility should direct more customers to you.

 For me the bottom line is do you want to be more profitable? Going green can help you do this. But be selective – you don’t have to do everything, but how much will it cost you to make sure all lights, photocopiers etc are switched off at night. It will cost you money on your electric bill. Switching them off increases your profit.

 
As a small company we can only go so far, but what we also do is give talks to local businesses about going green, train environmental charities in presentations skills (for free) to help them make their cases more effectively, put green tips on all our emails, brochures, web site etc. Trainers are communicators , so even if you can only cut your carbon emmission a little, you have the skills to persuade others to take the same route.

Cameron Scott
Greenfield