Being energy efficient and climate smart

A well-planned and strategic approach is the best way any organisation can be energy efficient and climate smart. The below seven easy to follow steps are provided in order to help establish the seeds of a much larger process which organisations need to commence in order to be truly climate smart.

Start by laying the foundations

Get senior management buy in for anything you do, without their understanding and support of what you are doing, progress will be minimal and frustration will be maximum. Help your organisation build an understanding of how you consume energy and what your carbon footprint is, how you can cut them and create a win-win for your business and the environment. Follow up by developing internal processes and expertise to serve as support for on-going actions.

1.Measure: Become familiar with your energy use and the business processes that are the major contributors to your organisations carbon footprint. Develop internal steps to measure building, transport systems and factory floor energy consumption. Why not build an energy smart building, there are professional organisations, energy efficiency specialists and significant amounts of free resources available on the internet to do this all yourself.

2.Prioritise: Now that you have measurements in place, you need to target the areas of your business that contribute to the highest energy consumptions and create the biggest carbon footprint. Yet again, get energy efficiency specialists, use new building designs suited to the environment and climate, etc... to identify opportunities to reduce waste and cut costs.

3.Reduce: Once you’ve prioritised, it’s important to follow through and implement the energy conservation measures that have been identified. It’s extremely important to focus on creating a conducive internal environment within your organisation and a corporate culture that focuses on energy conservation and overall waste reduction. Get specialist help to create a conservation program within your organisation, most important however is leading by example. Be leaders and not just managers.  

4.Offset: Once you’ve implemented your measures have a look at what you can do to offset those emissions that you don’t have much control over, do things like contributing to reforestation schemes and identify other local and international carbon offset programs. You may be lucky enough to create a carbon neutral organisation and reap in the rewards of being promoted as one.

5.Communicate: Following closely on the heels of the above is communicating your success as a low energy, low carbon or no carbon footprint company. A targeted communication strategy in tandem with a well-designed marketing campaign is a must. Result = Increased Sales and Profitability. A good ideas is to get ‘carbon neutral’ accreditation by third party organisations such as EC3 Global.

6.Rethink: Give some thought to reorganising your business, its products and services to take part in the growing green business movement globally.

7.Evaluate: This is where you restart the process again. Take into account the success of your previous efforts. Assess your progress and set new goals. Never think that the job is complete once you’ve done it once, always look for ways to improve yourself and the organisation you work for.

[The writer is Director, Business Partner Solutions Ltd. (www.bpslk.lk)]