YES Your Small Business Can Increase Its Margins If You Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

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Why don't you start by going for a grumpy walk around your business and making a list of every light and every power point and why they are used.
 Sure you will need to bend in some places to find where the power point actually is.
 You may even identify some fire hazards where people have added double adaptor onto double adaptor under desks.
 A proper power pack could solve this problem.
Start by looking at your lights.
 Is the light level right? Some offices are actually over lit.
 Many offices have the entire floor on one switch so if one person is working late the entire floor is lit up.
 City office blocks may look pretty from an aeroplane but offices emit 30% of our greenhouse gases.
  There are several suggestions for reducing your lighting bill:
  • Put timers and motion detectors in place for where there are problems getting people to turn lights off after hours.
  • Replace long old-style fluorescent tubes with modern LED tubes
  • Put reflectors behind the tubes to make them more effective
  • Replace incandescent globes with compact fluorescent globes but please put these in the recycling system not landfill because we don't want the mercury they contain in ground water.
  • LED and compact Fluorescent globes can replace halogen lights without changing the appearance of the ceiling.
     Be aware that halogen lights are low voltage and not low energy because a lot of people find this confusing.
When you are doing your grumpy walk, look for the small transformers that power so many things now, especially phones and mobile phones.
 Feel them.
 They are always warm meaning they are always using electricity.
Look for appliances on standby.
 Surprisingly things like laser printers use power even when they are turned off and only stop when they are unplugged.
Have a look in the kitchen.
 Office kitchens often have urns the use power all day, small fridges built into cupboards that do not work efficiently unless you give them better ventilation and microwaves that are left on.
Heating and cooling is an interesting one.
 People work most effectively when the temperature is between 22 and 24 degrees centigrade.
(around 80degees F).
 Interestingly people often want to have a higher temperature in winter and they feel cold below 26degrees and want to be cooler in summer.
 They tend not to want to wear winter clothes in winter - just a thick coat going to and from work.
  People have real idiosyncrasies around temperature.
 If you have middle aged women in your business (and I speak as a woman so I am stating fact not being rude) beware of letting them control the temperature settings.
 I had a secretary at one stage who was a fresh air freak and "could not" work without the window wide open all year, then wanted the office to still be kept warm! If you pay the power bill, you control the thermostat.
And there are many more things you can do that are just as easy.
 Just start to turn things off.
How easy is that! Apart from bending under desks to discover what is in your power points which could reduce your fire risk anyway it is a very straightforward exercise.
 The present financial crisis is the result of living beyond our financial means and we are doing the same thing with the environment.
 If we do not reduce our carbon footprint and start living within our environmental means the resulting environmental crash that we are leaving our children will be far worse than the current financial problem.
 Global warming is real and we all need to start reducing our carbon wastage including the millions of small businesses that are actually the major employers around the world.
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