Carbon Reduction
Top Tips
1) Buy locally produced food whenever possible and check for country of origin when you buy. Avoid out of season food, we were never meant to eat strawberries in winter anyway!
2) Make sure you don’t end up throwing food away just because you failed to check a sell by date. The energy used to produce, transport and store most food and especially meat products is significant and throwing it away means it just turns into more unwanted landfill gas.
3) Walk or cycle instead of using the car. It saves you petrol money, reduces your carbon emissions and keeps you fit at the same time!
4) Switch off everything you can all the time. When it is on it uses power when it’s off it does not. Most things do not use more energy to start up especially light bulbs.
5) Fill the kettle with only as much water, as you need, if everyone in Britain did this we could turn off a power station. Better still, pour the contents of the hot kettle into a thermos flask to use later, or just have cold drinks!
6) Don’t drink bottled water, it costs more than a litre of petrol in actual price and probably used that much to get it to you anyway.
7) If you have shares and investments then invest in green companies, they are currently performing well.
8) Recycle and buy recycled. It’s only by supporting a market for recycled goods that we will reduce our impact. If you only recycle one thing make sure its aluminium cans, we save 80% of the energy used in their creation by doing this.
9) It may be obvious, but avoid air travel. Several European train companies are now getting together to make rail travel across Europe a lot more integrated. There is certainly no excuse to fly short distance.
10) Consume less, every time we buy something unnecessary we not only waste our own cash but use up the worlds resources. If all the world population lived like we do we would need 3 planets. Our western live styles are simply not sustainable.
10 things to do at work
1) Find out about your companies environmental policies and challenge to make it better via such methods as recycling, turning off computers/lights after use, and carbon offsetting.
2) Switch off your PC when not in use for 20 minutes, or even your monitor if away from your desk for even a few minutes.
3) Recycle waste paper, if you don’t it fills up landfills, costs you and society money and turns into landfill gas.
4) Switch off lights whenever you see them left on, use natural lights by opening blinds it allows you to look at the outside world as well.
5) Reduce your car mileage by phoning, video conferencing or travelling by public transport.
6) Encourage your company to support an environmental leave scheme; it could be more fun than work!
7) Support any ’green team’ initiatives and suggest others.
8) Squeeze out your tea bags before disposing of them. Sounds silly but if everyone in Britain did just this it would mean 40 less lorries moving waste about every year, saving energy and costs.
9) Do not leave your mobile phone charger on, even when the phone is charged it uses the same power and it may even catch fire!
10) And finally talk about environmental issues at work, ask yourself is your business sustainable, that means forever….if it's not, you may be out of a job one day.