Published on Friday, Nov 12 2010 by
Environmental awareness is becoming a watchword for business in the 21st century. A greener profile for your firm can improve the bottom line as well as your image.
An Environmental Management System can help you:
- Save on energy and materials
- Increase profits
- Prove your company's green credentials
- Keep a competitive edge and open new markets
Business Link can help with funding for the advice, training and certification you need.An EMS provides a framework for identifying and managing your company's environmental impacts. It saves you money by increasing efficiency, ensures that youcomply with environmental legislation and provides benchmarks for improvements.
EMS principles have enabled companies to make dramatic savings on energy, fuel and materials - and promote a feelgood factor among staff. Increasingly, clients and customers are looking for environmental responsibility, which means greener firms have a competitive advantage.
Ferndown company Community Clean specialises in cleaning public spaces and structures and removing graffiti. Its teams can be seen regularly in Dorset, where their tasks include removing chewing gum from the streets of Bournemouth. Most of the company's work, though, is for London boroughs, under contracts won in the face of fierce competition. The company was one of the first in Dorset to win ISO 14001 accreditation for its Environmental Management System. Quality manager Sharon Izzard explains what has been involved...
"When we put our EMS in place we found it combined quite neatly with our existing quality management system, so we haven't found it too time-consuming. The EMS process involves first looking at the environmental
implications of all aspects of your business - office environment, outside work, waste disposal and so on - and scoring them. Those that impact most are the ones
you deal with first. | 
Left: Sharon Parker - Sales & Marketing Manager & right: Sharon Izzard - Quality Manager at Community Clean. |
It has prompted us to look at all aspects of our operation and make some significant changes for the better. An electrical audit of our offices made us realise how much energy we were using and what we could potentially save. Staff are now aware of the need to minimise energy consumption and not to leave anything running unnecessarily, and equipment goes promptly to saver mode. We decided to transform our network of 12 PCs to a 'thin client' system because it meant a reduction in power consumption of around 70 percent, but it has also brought other advantages: it consolidates our IT network and gives remote server access to our staff, saving extra time and fuel by cutting travelling.
The machines we use for removing chewing gum from pavements are now radically different. Previously they used 7,000 litres of water a day. We replaced them with machines using super-saturated steam which use about 40 litres a day.
Our contracts managers have just been issued with electric hybrid cars, and that means a 40 percent reduction in their fuel consumption. We will soon be switching our vans to hybrid technology as well. This sort of thing does help you win business as well as making sense in terms of cutting costs and reducing pollution. We have just won a new contract for one of the London boroughs, and the use of electric hybrid vans was part of the specification for that contract.
Looking forward we anticipate installing electricitygenerating solar panels on the roof
of our Ferndown building. There is a real bottom-line benefit from that as well.
We are currently in the process of recalculating our carbon footprint. It is becoming more and more important for a company to demonstrate its environmental credentials.In our business, because we deal with the public sector and large organisations, it is vital. Carbon footprint and sustainability are a key part of winning contracts. And overall we expect that the benefits will far outweigh the cost of cleaning up our own act."
Original press release by Business Link - November 2010.
