How you can help reduce national carbon emissions with a simple idea

This is a very simple idea that businesses could make use of to reduce transport associated carbon emissions and potentially save money and time. If your business regularly orders similar types of products, such as office supplies it’s likely that you could benefit from this simple idea.

Green Spaces

Photo by DeMatze.

The idea is that you create a ‘Green Space’ somewhere within your premises. Let’s take for example an educational establishment. Schools order paper, pencils and things like that on a regular basis. These orders are very often almost exactly the same each time. Some schools order as often as once a week, every week, through-out the year. We know this because we supply schools here at The Consortium.

Schools are a particularly good example for this idea because teachers can get the kids involved in this activity and they can even decorate their Green Space to make it fun. It’s also highly educational, which is great because, as I’ve mentioned in the past, eco-related jobs are becoming increasingly important.

How to do it

Using the example of the school, this is what would happen. The school would have to examine their average school supplies order volume and how much space it takes up in storage. Now, they’d have to decide how much more they can and would like to add to that order in order to reduce the frequency of their orders. So, a school that orders every week might decide that they can manage to reduce that to once a fortnight. If so they would have to create a Green Space that is equal to the size of their current storage space, thus doubling the capacity of their supplies storage area.

As a fun classroom activity teachers could create their Green Spaces in class rooms and while doing so they could show their students why they’re doing it. Older students could get stuck in to the maths, while younger children could learn about the concepts and have fun decorating the Green Spaces.

How does this help the environment?

By creating a Green Space you can consolidate the number of orders you make on your regular business supplies, thus reducing the CO2 emissions caused by those deliveries, due to reduced lorry load weight and potentially less road traffic. It’s very simple and many businesses are already promoting this kind of idea. However, by making it visual with the Green Space(s) it brings it to the forefront of the mind and by showing the consolidation in terms of physical storage space it makes what you are achieving clear and in front of your face.

Businesses are already doing similar things

An example of a business employing an alternative method of achieving a similar result is Lenor, a UK fabric softener brand. Lenor have developed a more highly concentrated version of their regular fabric softener, which can be used to soften the same amount of clothes as their less concentrated softener, but comes in a smaller bottle. This means they can fit the same product (in terms of what the product achieves) into a smaller space, therefore transporting more in their lorries, thus reducing the number of deliveries required, without compromising customer experience. If anything this enhances the customer experience. It’s a very simple yet great idea.

Have a go at making a Green Space

Photo by mzacha

If you’re going to have a go at creating a Green Space in your place of work it’s well worth putting a chart up by your Green Space, which records your progress in terms of CO2 emission reductions. This way you can see how good a job you’re doing to help save the planet. Check out this free example (below). It’s based on a 10 miles per gallon delivery lorry powered by diesel, and a 10 mile distance from your establishment. You can adjust these figures to fit your scenario but you can see from this excel document that you can really help reduce CO2 emissions with this simple idea, based on the example provided in the download.

Download the example chart (in Excel)