What?

Having established a commitment to environmental issues, your business can now look at the individual areas of the business that affect the environment. The next step is to make an assessment of current impacts. Often the best way to do this is to consider the most recent year. Depending on where you are in your financial cycle, you may wish to begin by assessing the impacts of your last financial year or current year to date. Some businesses look at the impacts on a month by month basis, which is an excellent format. It is then possible to see trends and make good estimates of emissions, resources and waste on a ‘per turnover’ or ‘per profit’ basis. Having established the impacts of your business in the recent past, it will be possible to set targets going forward. The key to reducing business emissions generally is improved efficiency. Targets should never be absolute figures, but expressed as amounts per turnover or profit. You may find targets difficult to set. Just how much can you reduce your emissions by? There is no fixed rule and you may simply want to do what you can and monitor the results. If your impacts are already very low, then a target of 3% reductions year on year can be a useful guide. A business that has made no efforts regarding the environment in the past may be able to make much larger reductions in the first year. The web pages in this section will look at a number of business areas. Each area is discussed in terms of assessment of impacts, targets to be set and methods of reduction.