Here at 24houressay.co.uk we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously, and we take steps to make sure our concern is translated into effective action. Some of these steps are fairly obvious: we only use energy efficient light bulbs; we only use recycled paper; we encourage the use of public transport and, when that's not possible, car sharing; and we regularly carry out an environmental audit to determine whether we're conserving energy as much as possible.
Beyond these steps, however, we're also making serious efforts to become carbon neutral, partly by cutting down on heavy carbon activities and partly by paying for various activities that are designed to off-set our carbon production. You may have heard of the Carbon Zero scheme, which encourages organisations to determine exactly how much carbon they are responsible for and to off-set that amount. We believe that this is a much better option that simple carbon trading, which merely encourages profligacy and allows heavy polluters to buy their way out of their environmental responsibilities.
In January 2010, we signed up to the 10:10 initiative, which encourages everyone to cut their carbon emissions by 10% during the year. You don't have to sign up as a company - you can sign up as an individual too, and their site has some great tips on how to make sure you're actions count!
One of the biggest surprises for us was the amount of energy that computers use, and we've been actively exploring options such as the VIA Carbon Neutral processor, which is estimated to cut computer-based carbon emissions by as much as 80%. Obviously this is cutting edge technology at the moment and very expensive to implement, but we believe that within a few years we will have reached or surpassed this standard, and we're currently looking into the possibility of subsidising uptake of such options among our writers. Clearly this alone is not going to solve the world's carbon problems, but we feel that by taking a number of small incremental steps we can find individual solutions that will add up to a genuine and beneficial impact on our carbon footprint.
We also make sure that any food available in our office conforms to strict environmental standards. As well as using as much local produce as possible, we also avoid products that contain too much packaging: not only does this cut down on the environmental cost of producing the item, it also helps reduce the amount of energy involved in recycling. Furthermore, anything that we use is carefully separated into various containers and taken for regular recycling. Since 2005, we estimate that we have reduced our carbon footprint by around 80% and reduced our level of non-recyclable goods from 75% to 10%. This is a good start, and it's beyond our original ambitions, but we recognise that we need to keep pushing to improve in this area. If you have any questions about our environmental policy, or any suggestions, we've love to hear from you at environment[at]24houressay.co.uk.
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