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The Carbon Trust: The Carbon Trust offers free carbon surveys to organisations whose energy bill is more than £50,000 a year. An inspector will visit your premises, assess the building and offer free or low-cost ways of cutting your footprint, and your energy bill in the process. The Carbon Footprint Calculator allows you to enter the number of sites, employees and figures for gas, electricity and vehicle mileage and calculates your carbon footprint based on emissions data from Defra.
One aspect is that you can save your footprint and others at regular intervals to assess the impact of any chances on your carbon output. It has two publications, Assessing the energy use on an industrial site and Assessing the energy use in a building, which give useful information on how to perform a walk-round assessment. There is also an action plan.
Paragon Software Systems: Paragon Software Systems has added a carbon minimiser option to its routing, scheduling and transport optimisation software, to improve environmental efficiency. The minimiser helps to reduce the carbon trust and fuel content of planned schedules.
Freight Transport Association: The FTA has developed its CarbonFTA to help members understand how to record, report and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The CarbonFTA Manual is available as either a book or on the internet. It contains information and advice and is applicable to van and light commercial vehicle operators as well as HGV operators. However, FTA's auditing service is a seperate paid-for facility. Although managing consultant Karen Packahm says it is a bespoke service, we get the impression it focuses more on improving fleet performance than carbon footprinting.
National Energy Foundation: The National Energy Foundation is one of the most useful websites to visit. It offers a quick carbon calculator that will probably be more than sufficient for the needs of small companies and a useful section of advice and links on where to find more information for your purpose and size of enterprise.
CM/Transfrigoroute Downloadable Audit: Transfrigoroute has developed a thorough environmental audit, which questions every aspect of your operation, including noise pollution, the effect on neighbours, battery and oil disposal, tyre policy, elminating offensive smells and water-protection systems. Waste management, energy conservation and maintenance procedures each receive a question sheet of their own, as do fuel economy, the visual impact of your site and th eenvironmental awareness of your staff.
The 12-page document is available to download from CM's own website, and any operator using it will have a clear idea of the environmental performance of their company, and steps to take to reduce its green impact. It doesn't calculate your carbon footprint, but it can be used as part of an overall action plan to reduce your carbon output. The CM/Transfrigoroute audit should be used every six months as a way of tracking improvements.
Staff Audits
Encouraging staff to audit their own lives and implement some of the ideas is a wonderful way to achieve 'buy-in'. Publish your own carbon footprint on the notice board/intranet and tell staff how you will reduce it. To calculate a personal/household footprint, just log on to the Carbon Calculator website.
External Certification
ISO14001 is the International Standards Organisation's standard for environmental management. It is demanding, but well worth achieving. Companies must demonstrate continual environmental improvement, and compliance with all relevant regulators, but there are no absolute performance levels you must hit.
The Carbon Trust Standard
The Carbon Trust Standard is awarded to companies that can demonstrate they have reduced their carbon footprint in either absolute or relative terms year-on-year. The award is held for two years and must then be re-applied for. The scheme is open to all companies regardless of size.
Product/Service lifecycle calculations
This month, Defra is to publish its standard for calculating the footprint of a product or service. Clearly it will be harder to calculate a standard figure for transport or construction services than for specific products, but not impossible. This may be useful to transport firms as more customers want to know the environmental impact of their transport contract. It can also be of value to any public-facing companies - such as the home-delivery network or removals sector - because it is not difficult to show the environmental benefits of one truckload against several cars or vans.
Supporting the Little Green Truck: Michelin and Shell
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