Future First

As eny fule no, I work for local government. Most of my job is administration for work experience, my particular field being extended work placements; basically, that’s when pupils go out to businesses for work-related learning for one or two days a week, either for vocational reasons or because they’re a little bit naughty (for which read almost unteachable in a normal classroom setting).

One of my other duties, however, is to act as the environmental representative. I’ll get to what that entails in a minute.

We had our team away day today; we went to a little conference centre, amusingly sited next to a mental hospital, and each did a presentation on various items relevant to our work, such as the recent National Work Experience Officer Conference, employer engagement and so on. My task was to give a short talk on the environment, which I’ve put below, because I thought it might be interesting. Or not. But it’s my blog, so I’ll post what I damn well want to.

Appropriately, I didn’t give handouts.

What is Our Environmental Scheme?
A scheme to reduce the local authority’s carbon footprint.

What is a carbon footprint?
A carbon foot print is the amount of CO2 that an individual or organisation produces. It’s a way of making your environmental impact easier to understand, so that you can have a concrete idea of how much you affect the environment.

How much do we have to reduce?
The goal is to reduce the carbon footprint by 18% by the year 2011-12

Why do we have to reduce it?
For several reasons. One is that central government has a target of reducing national energy use and emissions by 60% by 2050. Another is that it will save money for the local authority and thus the taxpayer. Probably the best reason for it, though, is to try to avoid the disastrous consequence of climate change.

What else should we be reducing besides CO2?
The environmental action plan calls for the following reductions as well: a 20% reduction in energy use, a 25% reduction in waste generated by the local authority as a whole, and an unspecified reduction in water usage.

What are the implications?
On a day to day basis, not very much of our lives will change, and it certainly shouldn’t be much effort or present us with much difficulty to effectively act to reduce the amount we consume and waste. It’s pretty simple – we just have to implement some easy policies about how we run the office.

What policies can we implement to reduce our carbon footprint?
Small but effective ones. Every little bit that we save is important, because it all builds up.
The main principle we should bear in mind when thinking about reducing our carbon footprint is the three Rs – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle¹.

What does that mean?
Basically, it describes the best way to minimise your carbon footprint. If you can, you should reduce the amount of things that you use first; this immediately drops your carbon footprint.

If you don’t use it, you can’t waste it.

If you can’t reduce what you use, reuse it. Your carbon “mileage” will basically be doubled for whatever you’re using and you’ll save money.

And finally, if you can’t reduce or reuse, you should recycle.

Actual Policies
We’ve seen the reasons for the policies, and the principles behind them; so how do we actually reduce our carbon footprint? By following the principle of the 3Rs.
You can

Reduce the amount of electricity you use by switching off your monitor when you’re away from your desk. Unplug anything you can when it’s not in use, like mobile phone chargers and so on. Turn off unnecessary lights when nobody is using a room. Unplug photocopiers and printers over the weekend.

Reduce the amount of petrol you use by taking public transport whenever possible or by carpooling.

Print double-sided wherever possible. This saves paper and money.

Encourage people to send you emails instead of faxes, and faxes instead of post.

You can

Reuse scraps of paper. Sheets which come at the end of emails with only a few lines printed on them or fax confirmations can be used as scratch paper for making quick notes of telephone calls and so on.

Reuse the cardboard boxes that printer paper comes in. These make excellent document boxes for long term document storage, if, for example, you need to keep forms or documents for a specified number of years.

Reuse punched pockets, folders and so on.

Don’t print emails unless you have to. If you have to, always print them double-sided.

And finally, you can

Recycle paper or plastic

All of these are little things which you can do with hardly any effort, but which will make a lot of difference. To look at it the other way, let’s say for the sake of argument that every single one of the 19,000 local government employees in this area² has a flatscreen monitor like the ones we use in the office. If everyone left his or her computer monitor on for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would dump nearly 13 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That’s about as much as 3 million average houses or 900,000 average family cars. If we use our monitors only for the time we’re actually at work, that drops by 78%.

Our office uses approximately 5 reams of paper a week. That’s 204 reams a year, which is 102,000 sheets of paper every year. That means that we’re killing 16 fully grown trees a year with our office alone. At a conservative estimate, if the rest of the council used paper at the same rate as us, we would be killing nearly 28,000 trees a year. That’s getting on for 400 square miles of trees every year. If we stopped printing only a quarter of the things we do, and did the rest double sided, we’d reduce the amount of paper used to 38,250 sheets, or 76.5 reams. That’s a reduction of 62.5%. We can do this by not printing or copying when we don’t absolutely need to; if you can read it off a screen and don’t need to keep the information in hardcopy, you don’t need to print it at all.

These are just a couple of easy suggestions.

It’s all about common sense. You don’t need to drastically change your life or job to reduce the carbon footprint. You can make a lot of difference just by being sensible, by taking as small an action as turning off your monitor when you’re about to go home, or even when you go to lunch.

Because small actions make a difference, we can really do this. It really has to be done, and it’s going to be easy. You just have to do your part, and you can do it with just one finger. Click and press; click double sided when you print, and press the power button on your monitor, and we’ll be half way there.

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¹ Apparently, I independently came up with the waste hierarchy just by thinking about it with no prior input from outside. Not that I did it first, just independently. Weird.

² Yes, we employ nineteen thousand people.