Te Awamutu Sustainability Champions 2014/15

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10 Te Awamutu Sustainability Champions 2014/15
1. List your activities that impact on the environment: Once environmental impacts are understood, they can be
more easily prioritised and managed. Examples are driving, heating, paper, refrigeration, packaging, purchasing.
2. Measure, measure and measure your resource use: If you do nothing else for a year, just measure and get a
year’s worth of data as a benchmark to improve. Recording and periodically reviewing information about your
resource use can allow trends, patterns, inefficiencies and unexplained consumption spikes to be observed.
Electricity use, water consumption and waste generation are basic measurables, but monitoring other resources
your business uses can also be insightful.
3. Reduce waste to landfill: Sending waste to landfill is associated with large environmental and often financial
costs. There are many easy ways to reduce the volume of waste your business sends to landfill.
For example:
• install recycling bins to collect recyclable waste
• decrease the size and number of landfill bins – if recycling is the easier option, it is more likely to occur
• set up a worm farm or bokashi bin for food and organic waste
• donate unwanted items to charity or list them on The Waste Exchange website
• look at the kinds of items ending up in your waste and see if there are creative ways to reduce or eliminate
them from your waste stream (e.g. if cheap disposable pens keep breaking, consider finding a more reliable
alternative that does not need to be replaced so frequently).
4. Increase energy efficiency: Increasing energy efficiency is not only beneficial to the environment, it also leads to
measurable cost savings. Some simple ways to increase energy efficiency include:
• switching to energy saving light bulbs
• switching off electrical appliances when they are not in use
• avoiding energy waste associated with heating and cooling. e.g. not having heating on and window open, or
closing doors to areas that do not need to be heated
• choosing electrical appliances with Energy Star accreditation.
5. Use water carefully: Clean water is a limited resource and there are numerous ways to reduce water consumption
at your workplace. For example, adding water displacement devices, such as filled water bottles, into toilet cisterns
can save 3-6 litres per flush, and fixing leaks promptly can save 200 litres per week. Water pollution is also a factor
to be considered, but even simple actions such as switching to ‘eco’ cleaning products can significantly reduce the
impacts of your business on the environment.
6. Decrease paper consumption: Moving to electronic storage and communication systems dramatically reduces
the volume of paper consumed by most businesses, and also has other benefits such as easier management and
oversight. Paper consumption can also be reduced by nearly 50 per cent if printers are set to print double-sided
by default. For those businesses already doing this, there are many other ways to further increase paper efficiency
such as:
• using narrower margins
• choosing other fonts
• reusing scrap paper
• printing 2:1 page ratios for draft copies.
Many businesses find they are much less dependent on using large volumes of paper than they initially thought.
10 TIPS TO BECOMING A MORE
SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS