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Sign the Oxford Business Climate Change Pledge

Case Studies

Milton Keynes PCT: Small steps add up to great leaps toward a smaller carbon footprint

Supporting Public Health is an NHS agency hosted by Milton Keynes PCT. We have around 80 staff and occupy a privately rented building on Oxford Business Park South. We recently introduced a new environmental policy and we're taking action to reduce our environmental impact. Nothing that we've done is horribly difficult or expensive, but here's the net effect of a few small changes:

To help us along the way, we've had support and advice from Oxford City Council, the Carbon Trust and Oxford Is My World. Our next challenge is travel to and for work. There's plenty more to do, with further savings in both carbon and cash to follow. Watch this space!

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Green Accountancy: helping small businesses reduce their environmental impact

Green Accountancy was founded by David Wilsdon in 2007 with the aim of helping and encouraging small businesses to reduce their environmental impacts. David was previously a partner at a medium-sized Oxford firm, which he left to become technical director at a national company.

Having spoken to many clients he found that many small businesses wanted help with reducing their impacts and presenting their green credentials. To do this from a genuine position of knowledge and experience David undertook two years of study at Oxford University in Environmental Conservation. With this knowledge under his belt he set about creating Green Accountancy, an accountancy firm providing all normal accountancy and tax services, but with a minimum environmental impact and with the intention of helping other small businesses “go green”.

Since then Green Accountancy have been providing best practice accountancy and taxation advice alongside advice on the environmental impacts of business decisions. This advice includes a simple five step plan enabling small businesses to take up environmental actions and benefit from doing so, leading businesses to consider the l taxation savings available through environmental action; assessing current position; targeting and reducing impacts and preparing environmental policy statements.

David has said that “Accountants should help clients grow their business, reduce costs, increase efficiency and save tax. Considering the environment does all of these things and presents a business as well managed, modern and forward thinking. An added bonus is often a significant improvement in staff moral and retention.”

Green Accountancy also practices what it preaches: all electricity including the servers providing the website is 100% renewable. Transport impacts are minimised by using public transport and waste vegetable oil fuels their cars. All suppliers are vetted for environmental credentials and recycled products are used where available. Carbon emissions are recorded using the firms own Carbon Accounting system developed specifically for small businesses. In fact they form a template for what every small business can do to reduce their carbon emissions.

 

Oxford City Council: Getting Its House in Order

Oxford City Council is committed to playing a leading role in tackling climate change. Since 2005 Oxford City Council has had a Climate Change Action Plan and in April 2008 they agreed their carbon management plan called Getting Our House in Order.

Since then the council has been hard at work implementing the plan which aims to reduce the council's carbon dioxide emissions by a challenging 25% by the end of March 2011 (and then 3% year on year thereafter) compared to its baseline year (2005/6).

The plan that maps out how the council will achieve the ambitious carbon reduction target and underpins potential financial savings to the Council of around £1.24 million over 5 years.


The Council exceeded its 800 tonne target for the first year of the programme through a series of initiatives such as:

Following achievements made in the first year, the Carbon Trust described Oxford City Council as an exemplar authority and one that is taking a lead in lowering carbon emissions thanks to its strongly focussed Carbon Management Board, Carbon Management Team and network of Carbon Champions.

Peter Roberts from the Carbon Trust, who attended this months Carbon Management Team meeting, commented
“The Carbon Trust has funded two projects at OCC in the past year. It is rare that the Carbon Trust funds two projects in parallel in one year but reflects our view that Oxford City Council is an authority that can make things happen. The ‘Getting Our House in Order’ programme is an excellent example of best practice for other authorities to follow and one that we often cite in our national training seminars and workshops”.

Cllr John Tanner, Board Member for a Cleaner, Greener Oxford and lead sponsor of the carbon management programme said, “Cutting carbon emissions as part of the fight against climate change is one of the Council’s key priorities. We are already on a path to becoming a lower carbon council but we have a lot more work to do to achieve our high ambitions and provide wider leadership to local businesses, communities and households in reducing the overall carbon footprint of Oxford City.”

For more information about the work Oxford City Council is doing to reduce carbon emissions, log on to www.oxford.gov.uk/environment.

 

RM Education PLC: Making the environment central

RM is an education resources company based at Milton Park, employing 1200 people locally and 2500 globally. RM is the leading supplier of IT solutions to the UK education sector.

In 2004, a group of employees set-up an environmental group with the objective of raising awareness about our impact, and to influence improvements internally. This has since grown into a substantial set of multi-divisional projects with high level company eco-objectives to drive year-on-year improvements.

Their current commitments and progress are now publically visible at www.rm.com/greenrm.

It sets out three areas of focus - ‘Us’, ‘Supporting You’ and ‘Our Products’ – providing customers with details of the environmental performance of the company and its products, as well as offering environmentally-relevant educational resources.

They have also partnered the Woodland Trust to sponsor their Nature Detectives Web site – an educational resource for teachers and parents.

Raising awareness

Green RM has hosted a number of events designed to encourage our people to take more personal responsibility for their actions. These included:

Transport

We continue to work to improve the environmental impact of our car fleet. Estimated Miles per gallon of our fleet improves each year as replacement vehicles achieve much tougher efficiency standards. Our fleet MPG is now up to an average of 49.5 MPG vs. 46.2 MPG in 2007. We’ve operated a diesel and hybrid-only fleet for four years, and now have nine hybrid vehicles. We regularly review our car fleet policy, with the aim of improving environmental performance – which also equates to substantial cost savings via reduced fuel bills.

We’ve also tasked our field-based business operations with finding new ways of delivering services, utilising latest communications & IT technology to reduce the need to drive. An example of this is that improved fault diagnosis up front in our Hardware repair dept has led to 7% fewer site visits.

We’ve also now set targets to reduce flights.

The Group now offers a Cycle to Work scheme, which allows staff to purchase bicycles at preferential prices using a salary sacrifice approach. Over 100 employees have already signed up.

Energy

The Group has in place a process for recording and setting targets for electricity usage across all of the Group’s larger facilities. We have continued to source ‘green’ energy for these facilities.

Some tremendous energy efficiency improvements have been introduced in the construction of new Server Data Centres, both in the use of efficicent cooling, and through Server Virtualisation (for the techies!)

Eco-products

Wherever possible, we aim to reduce the environmental impact of our products. RM manufacturers 130,000 computers a year so we can have a significant impact on energy consumption in UK education establishments.

During 2008, 61% of the computers we produced were categorised as lower power. We met our objective of introducing a sub-50W including monitor ecoquiet computer early, and have been shipping this technology since summer 2008. That’s a fully operational PC and monitor consuming 20% less energy than a 60W light-bulb!

The RM Mobile One was the first Notebook computer to achieve the Energy Saving Recommended label.

Waste & recycling

We have also made some substantial progress to reduce packaging, both from suppliers and internal use.  We have removed all unnecessary paper content from our Notebook and Desktop PC’s, and we've made mice, keyboards and mouse mats optional.  We've also introduced a recycling service for the foam end-caps our hardware is shipped in, since they are difficult to recycle.

Hopefully it goes without saying that we have a comprehensive internal recycling facilities. In the last quarter, recycling levels have reached 62% of our waste.

If you have any suggestions to help them to improve further – please contact RM at greenideas@rm.com.

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Supported by:

Oxford City CouncilThe Midcounties Co-operative