Our Top Five Recommendations on How Businesses with Multiple Sites Can Reduce Their Carbon Footprint
It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to taking action on your business’ carbon emissions. For businesses with multiple sites, this can be an even more complicated endeavour. Buildings of different ages, functions, and efficiency levels each come with their own specific problems and creative solution requirements. This guide sets out our top 5 things to consider when planning carbon reduction across your multi-site business.
Cohesive Sustainability Strategy & Policies Following the ESG Framework
First things first, putting a stake in the ground and creating a sustainability strategy helps to give your business direction and goals to work towards. When creating your strategy, a holistic, top-down approach is best. (1) This means considering how sustainability can be embedded into your existing values, policies, and activities, and how you can leverage your voice and impact as an organisation.
Creating your strategy around the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles can make a difference to your impact on both your local environment and the climate, as well as local communities and the people influenced by your business. (2)
Once your sustainability strategy is in place, it is important to make sure this is communicated effectively to your employees, supply chains, stakeholders, customers, and wider network. Digital communication tools such as marketing emails, email footers, newsletters, social media platforms and intranets, as well as some print marketing such as including FSC logos on your packaging can be really effective for external communications.
Understanding Current Emissions & Potential Savings Opportunities: Energy, Water & Carbon Reduction Audits & Projects
One of the first practical steps to take to reduce your carbon emissions would be a full site audit, (3) which can measure the impact of your current energy and water usage and identify the most effective opportunities and capital investment required for retrofits, upgrades, and sustainable technology solutions. Undertaking a comprehensive audit is a highly effective way to make a tailored, informed strategy for reducing carbon, with technological solutions specific to each individual building.
These solutions could include LED lighting, renewable energy tech such as solar PV and battery storage, heat pumps, water, and washroom efficiency, such as sensor taps or waterless urinals, electric vehicle charging, and building management and optimisation systems. These measures can reduce energy and water usage and supply clean renewable energy, reducing your utility costs alongside your carbon footprint. Once the audits have been completed on all your sites, you’ll be better placed to make decisions on the most effective and viable projects to undertake within your carbon reduction plan.
Working out which steps to take will be unique and depend on what is practical and viable for your organisation. But any improvements, however small, will make a difference and contribute to the UK’s national targets.
Enabling Employee Advocacy
Having a team of sustainability champions across your departments and sites to create a green taskforce can ensure that different perspectives and ideas are shared, and the different operations within your organisation can contribute to the holistic strategy. This will ensure that teams internally as well as these parties can work together to keep on track when working towards your carbon reduction goals. This approach also means that you’ll have accountability for your pledges and commitments, and benefit from other aspects of sustainability, including long term resilience in terms of your built environment and more financial stability.
Across your workforce, instilling a sustainable work mindset can make a significant difference to your Scope 3 indirect emissions, for example by offering a sustainable transport policy (4) such as a car share scheme, cycle to work, or offering savings on electric vehicle leasing such as the EV Salary Sacrifice by Octopus electric vehicles scheme. (5)
Immediate & Budget Friendly Changes
If you are just starting on your sustainability journey and large capital projects are a longer-term strategy, other sustainable practices could include:
· Ensuring energy usage is optimised so that equipment is not wasting energy when not in use (e.g. mindful use of heating, taking laptops off charge when they have full batteries, turning off lights, and other equipment).
· Ensuring staff kitchens have glasses, cups, and cutlery to discourage buying single-use items.
· Gifting employees with reusable water bottles.
· Encouraging printing less and switching to digital documents.
There are also options for budget friendly retrofit products and sustainable swaps:
· Fitting cistern water displacement bags.
· Fitting tap aerators.
· Swapping out traditional shower heads for eco versions.
· Ditching the paper towels and installing energy efficient hand dryers.
· Switching to recycled toilet paper.
· Switching to refill cleaning and washing up products in staff kitchens.
Certifications & Influence
Outside of governance and compliance, you can use your voice as an organisation to empower your sphere of influence to align themselves with your commitment to sustainability. Social media and a dedicated ESG website section can be used to spread this message. Your commitment can be reinforced by signing up to the Science Based Targets initiative, (6) certifying via B Corp, (7) environmental management system ISO14001 (8) or energy management system ISO 50001 (9), enrolling your staff on carbon literacy education, or identifying which of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) your strategy and operations align to, and communicating these across your platforms. (10)
Working closely together with your supply chain towards your carbon reduction goals can be mutually beneficial to reduce unnecessary waste and take control of the indirect carbon emissions.
This article has been written by SaveMoneyCutCarbon and is correct at (May 2024). This content does not constitute advice and is for general guidance and educational purposes only. It should not be circulated or used in presentations or materials without prior approvals and does not constitute legal advice or formal training. Always undertake your own research before taking any action. It is recommended that specific professional advice relevant to any particular or individual situation is sought before acting on any information given (© 2024 SaveMoneyCutCarbon.com)
Bibliography
1 Whelan, T. & Fink, C. (2016) The Comprehensive Business Case for Sustainability https://hbr.org/2016/10/the-comprehensive-business-case-for-sustainability
2 Rafi, T. (2022) Why sustainability is crucial for corporate strategy https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/why-sustainability-is-crucial-for-corporate-strategy/
3 SaveMoneyCutCarbon Energy and Water Efficiency Audits (accessed May 2024) https://www.savemoneycutcarbon.com/sustainability-services/insight/energy-water-efficiency-audits/
4 World Business Council for Sustainable Development (accessed May 2024) How business is supporting sustainable commuter transport https://www.wbcsd.org/Programs/Cities-and-Mobility/Transforming-Urban-Mobility/Commuting-Behavior-Change/How-business-is-supporting-sustainable-commuter-transport
5 Octopus Electric Vehicles (accessed May 2024) EV Salary Sacrifice https://octopusev.com/salary-sacrifice
6 SBTi (accessed May 2024) WHAT ARE SCIENCE-BASED TARGETS? https://sciencebasedtargets.org/how-it-works
7 B Corporation (accessed May 2024) https://bcorporation.uk/
8 International Organisation for Standardisation (accessed May 2024) ISO 14000 family: Environmental management
https://www.iso.org/iso-14001-environmental-management.html
9 International Organisation for Standardisation (accessed May 2024) ISO 50001 Energy management https://www.iso.org/iso-50001-energy-management.html
10 Sustainable Development Goals (2023) Communications materials https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/