Firms urged to involve employees in green schemes
in helping reduce carbon emissions, claiming that inclusive cost
effective schemes can save up to 20 per cent on energy bills.
Solutions director Hugh Jones claimed that small actions carried out by workers can be just as effective in reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as grander initiatives carried out by the boss. "You can put in a new energy-efficient boiler, or install low-energy lightbulbs, and those will make a difference, but many of the measures that will have the biggest impact and achieve the greatest savings require buy-in across the workplace," said solutions director Hugh Jones. Recommendations According to the Carbon Trust, employers must encourage workers to make general tweaks to their everyday office routine, including finding alternative transport to get to work, turning lights off and not leaving computers on when they go home at night. They must also make sure general appliances, for example freezers or cool units, are always securely sealed, he added. "You need your teams to think twice before printing documents, to turn off their PCs and lights at the end of the day, to participate enthusiastically in recycling schemes and to consider the carbon footprints of the method of travel they use and the products they source," Jones said. Worker survey The Carbon Trust also claims that employees actively want to help their companies be more environmentally friendly. According to a survey carried out by the trust on over 4,000 UK workers, 70 per cent of employees want to cut carbon emissions, but felt that more help needed to come from the boss. A massive 80 per cent of those questioned said they had received no training in reducing carbon emissions, and 21 per cent thought the companies they worked for did not make enough efforts to be environmentally friendly. The idea of 'green' training was enthusiastically welcomed by many, and out of those who had already had some encouragement in this area, 93 per cent rated the training as "fairly or very useful". The Carbon Trust and the food industry The Carbon Trust is a UK government-funded organisation, established to help companies throughout the company switch to low or green energy emissions. Last month five food firms - British Sugar, Colors, Danone Waters, Mey Selections and Molson Coors - signed up to trial the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) model, designed to assess greenhouse gas emissions. The Carbon Trust also has a carbon labelling scheme, already adopted by Cadbury and Coca-Cola, as well as an online calculator for determining a company's carbon dioxide (CO2) output.
