Come on Armstrong team, let’s be having your ideas on how we can reduce our carbon footprint. Doesn’t matter how big or small, I’m open to your suggestions…..
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Come on Armstrong team, let’s be having your ideas on how we can reduce our carbon footprint. Doesn’t matter how big or small, I’m open to your suggestions…..
Categories: Uncategorized
BBC News
13 responses so far ↓
Martin Lynch // April 11, 2008 at 7:28 am |
If we fitted a shower (don’t ask me where!) maybe more people would be encouraged to cycle/run/walk to work. Also the rest of develoment wouldn’t have to smell my armpits all day!!
Neal Wadeson // April 17, 2008 at 4:13 pm |
Couple of simple idea’s…
1. Attach timers to the printers to switch them off when not in use.
2. Use a Software utility to hibernate and auto start desktop pc’s out of hours.. For example this will automatically shut down your machine at 9pm and boot it up at 7am ready for you to use in the morning.. (I do this on my home machine and it works well).
3. A bit more complex, but we could look at using Win Terminals instead of PC’s for admin staff. These use substantially less power..
Cheers
Neal
Janine Oxley // April 17, 2008 at 4:16 pm |
Here’s some details on an eco button (more for marketing?) tool.
http://www.lesmar.com/ecobutton
Janine
Letitia Austin // April 17, 2008 at 4:30 pm |
Armstrong should seriously look at taking steps to become a ‘paperless company’ .
alexreeves // April 17, 2008 at 4:43 pm |
How do we become more “paperless” Letitia? Any thoughts on how we achieve this?
Alex
Mike Tomlinson // April 17, 2008 at 5:43 pm |
Fit all rooms with light sensors.
These would only switch on the light in the room when natural light falls below an acceptable standard.
Simon Black // April 18, 2008 at 7:04 am |
As a certified pedant it would be interesting to know where ACL has the biggest carbon impact. It is probably the car travel & there may be little we can do about 30 odd consultants travelling the UK every day, however the office is probably not very carbon efficient. For example its hot so turn on the AC rather than open the windows/turn down the heating is the frequent response. PCs are left on all night (eg training room), as is the AC quite frequently. I think there is a long way to go in the educational process! We have to start somewhere though so your project will do some good.
Another idea would be to place small paper recycling bins at each desk & make staff walk to throw away non recyclable materials rather than the other way round as it is now.
Owen Turner // April 18, 2008 at 7:12 am |
Consultants might be able to make more use of trains and car shares than at present.
Also correlating assignment of new sites with the home address of the consultants as part of the decision process might be helpful.
alexreeves // April 18, 2008 at 7:33 am |
That’s a good point Owen – I have been tracking sales miles as part of the experiment, and wanted to extend to consultants. I suspect that the distance to site is not taken into consideration when assigning consultants to projects as there are rarely more than one or two consultants available at any one time to a new project. So our selection criteria are probably:
1) Availability
2) Experience
…and we never get to 3) Distance from home
I will get started on this measurement now – I think the results in terms of now vs. the optimal model will be very interesting.
Mike Tomlinson // April 18, 2008 at 10:01 am |
We should accept Electronic Signatures and email submission of Software Licence Agreements and Service Agreements.
The current multipart sets are sent/taken to clients – forwarded to Harpenden and then sent on to Access in Colchester. It strikes me as a slow and inefficient way considering we are an IT company.
Letitia Austin // April 18, 2008 at 10:24 am |
Hi Alex,
I’ve now had time to think this through and in answer to the question asked – Paperless how? Here are my suggestions;
Before you press print, ask yourself if it is absolutely necessary. Do you have a digital copy of the e-mail / document? Why exactly do you need a printed version (duplication)?
Educational documents /whitepapers are accessible on-line and can be downloaded from the website. Duplicates are then sent out in the post (marketing being the culprits here).
The accounts department can request and send out electronic invoices. Online banking can be used to issue checks, and set up automatic recurring payments. (The accounts department have requested that several documents be embossed and hard copied to save printing. To date no action has been taken).
Use the print preview function before you print off documents, this will hopefully highlight any alterations that you may need to make an avoid printing useless pieces of paper.
All departments could send electronic faxes instead of paper faxes and print on both sides of a page.
If the company need to use paper, maybe they could use the recycled kind throughout the business.
The benefits
Going paperless can reduce costs for toner, ink, electricity, and other related expenses including postage and storage.
Alex Reeves // April 18, 2008 at 3:53 pm |
Simon also had a good idea regarding recycling – we swap the bins under the desks to recycled materials only, and ask people to deposit non-recycled waste in a central bin (it is currently the other way around!).
We should then measure the amount of recycled material vs. the non-recycled to see if we are reducing our paper usage.
Alex
Sunny Aujla // April 21, 2008 at 11:12 am |
Not sure if these have been covered in the other posts but some ideas…
1. Put thermostats for heating/AC in the actual area of the office that they control. We currently have an scenario (and I understand its because of changes to office layout) whereby the AC controller for development is in support. The heating thermostat for downstairs seems to be in development.
2. Encourage people to open windows rather than automatically turn on the AC.
3. Deploy some software that auto hibernates all PC’s left on overnight. And timers for all other non essential electronic equipment.
4. One that I suspect is very simple to do – draught proof the front door – it’s got a 1 cm gap which lets in quite a lot of cold air in the winter!
5. Have a close look at the central heating timers to see if they do only come on when needed. I have a suspicion that our heating is on much more than it needs to be.
6. Turn off all lights before leaving at night.
7. Turn of the AC before leaving at night.