Uckfield Matters Magazine Feb 2018

usinessmatters
YOUR BUSINESS MATTERS
How to help your business help the environment
by Sue Edwards
If you run a business, however large or small, you may not naturally think of ways
to help the environment. But there is a lot that you can do.
ELLIE IN HER OWN WORDS:
A search for online data led me to a
website called ‘Carbon Brief’, who
specialise in the understanding of climate
change. They predict that global CO2
emissions were likely to increase by 2% in
2017, after plateauing for three years.
So, there are lots of things those of us
who run businesses can do to help the
environment.
Don’t print anything if you don’t need
to. Keep documents on your computer,
rather than in a filing cabinet. Go
one step further and use an online
service like Dropbox or Google Drive
to file documents. This will keep your
computer’s memory space free to a
maximum and means you can access
documents on the go.
Reduce paper waste by emailing clients
instead of writing letters. Shred waste
paper and donate it to a charity for reuse,
such as the horse rescue.
THE PROBLEM WITH TRANSPORT
Not surprisingly, the change which has
the most impact is methods of transport.
Keep car journeys to a minimum. Take
a bus or train. Try to do more than
one errand in a trip. If you have five
car journeys for five different errands
(starting with a cold engine), you will use
twice as much fuel than if you did it all in
one trip. Regarding efficiency, from worst
to best, transport options are plane, lone
car journeys, train and bus. According to
the RAC Foundation, transport is the UK’s
second largest source of CO2.
And of course, some good habits for all
of us - recycle your mobile phone rather
than dumping it, and correctly recycle
your office or business waste.
So there we have it. Food for thought and
perhaps this will help to remind us to
consider the environment more in the
future.
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