Green fingers

Contractors working to ISO 14001: 1996 have to set objectives and targets and demonstrate continual improvement with respect to overall environmental performance. An easy way to address this is to set mini environmental projects.

To start with you must have undertaken the environmental aspect analysis of your organisation. Hopefully this will have identified some action areas for consideration. Once these areas are identified you can set annual reduction targets.

Remember, don’t get carried away with over optimistic targets for the first year. You can always review and continue in year two if reductions are still possible. Some typical areas to consider environmental improvements are:

• Electricity: How much energy do you use within your organisation for power and lighting? Get bills for the last year and review your usage. If you have large offices, can you fit lighting controls or other power saving devices?
• Gas: If you have gas-fired boilers, are they serviced correctly, set at the right temperatures or overheating the workplace? Again, get the last year’s bills and consider any reduction initiatives.
• Water: Are you on a metered supply? Are you wasting water? Obtain and review a year’s bills.
• Vehicle/fuel: Do you have a transport policy? Are your vehicles correctly serviced? Have you considered alternative fuel? Some garages will loan vehicles with alternative fuel on trial to see if it is feasible for your organisation. Are you matching your workforce’s home location to their site locations? You will be surprised how many people in the same company pass each other in the opposite direction after an hour’s journey to work.
• Paper: What is your stationery budget? You could be in for a surprise when you find out. How much paper is wasted? What do you do with scrap paper? How many unnecessary e-mails are printed? Do you have a policy for document control and can you introduce ways to reduce the use and cost of paper?

The above are directly related to use or consumption. If you introduce simple improvement measures and aim for a 2-5% reduction in use, it may surprise you how much money you could save.

Some further improvement initiatives follow are:

• Introduction of a recycling programme: How do you dispose of your waste materials? Can you segregate your waste? What do you do with used toner cartridges? Firms collect used inkjet and toner cartridges free of charge. When you consider that empty inkjet and toner cartridges can be worth up to £3.50 and £7.00 respectively, recycling them can be an interesting opportunity to recover some costs.
• Suppliers and subcontractors: Do you pass environmental initiatives onto your suppliers? Do you know your subcontractors’ environmental status? If not, find out.
• Plant: Do you ensure that all plant and equipment is correctly serviced and correctly maintained? Inefficient plant will use more fuel and is prone to leaking on site, so introduce a maintenance programme.
• Company staff: Do you encourage staff to practise good environmental techniques at home as well as work?

My advice to all contractors is not to try and take on too many projects at once. It is always best to ‘hurry slowly’ with two or three improvement projects per year, aiming for realistic reduction targets.

Prioritise your improvement projects. If you take on board my suggestions, you will probably find yourself with enough to keep going for several years. Make sure that you cost out each project, so that you can equate reductions to cost savings. Once you have met your reduction targets and feel that it is unlikely to reduce any further, continue to monitor usage and performance.