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Sign the Oxford Business Climate Change Pledge

Case Studies

Free Green Fleet ReviewsCM Isometric Yellow Van

The Energy Saving Trust could help you save £1,000 per vehicle per year! Green Fleet Reviews provides highly tailored fleet management advice to help you lower running costs, reduce environmental impact and enhance corporate social responsibility. To be eligible for a Green Fleet Review you need to operate a fleet of 50 or more vehicles (up to 3.5 tonnes) in England, Wales, or 20 or more in Scotland. The review is funded by the Department for Transport, the Welsh Assembly Government, and the Scottish Executive. Green Fleet Reviews are carried out by specialists with a wide spectrum of experience working with a range of fleets. Many case studies are made available by the EST.

The EST also offfe advice for small fleets inlcuding downloadable guides and case studies and the answers to difficult questions.

 

Tourism Business Climate-Proofing

Are you a smart business? You may be focused on surviving the recession, but there are things you can do--now--to reduce the future risks to your business, make the most of emerging opportunities, and keep ahead of the game as the economic outlook improves.

How? Weather patterns are changing, and severe events such as floods, heatwaves, and droughts are likely to become more frequent and intense. Warmer temperatures may bring higher visitor numbers, but could also strain resources in times of drought.

Smart businesses are environmentally and socially responsible, but they also know that climate change represents a business continuity issue as well as an opportunity. Forward-looking businesses are starting to prepare and adapt--just as they would to any other issue affecting their industry. In the current economic climate, they know that being resilient could mean the difference between success and failure.

This toolkit is designed to help you, as a tourism business, prepare for the effects of our changing climate. It is structured around the impacts of flooding, heatwave, and drought. Each section tells you how your business might be affected, suggests practical actions that you can take to reduce the risk or take advantage of the opportunities, and guides you to further information and support.

The checklist lets you record your progress quickly in adapting your business to climate change and provides you with a personalised action plan complete with signposts to relevant further help.

 

UK CIP Information database “The Brain”

Over time UKCIP has collected a significant resource of research activities, adaptation actions, impacts of climate/weather and news of general climate change activities. We want to share our collective knowledge with our stakeholders. The BRAIN is the route to all our knowledge - UKCIP

 

New Jersey university of architecture professor presents us how to construct an eco-friendly house on a budget

Are you aware that 2 New York City based designers designed an asymmetrical home with fixed budget of $250,000?

Designers and Jersey City residents Richard Garber (assistant professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design in Newark) and Nicole Robertson of GRO Architects rose to the difficult task of creating and managing the construction of a single-family house that’s a true proof of both innovative design and eco-friendly technologies. Denis Carpenter recently bought a compact vacant lot and, to attempt his interest for the ecosystem, wished a house that was efficient and very easy to maintain.

What's so exceptional about this home?
- Inside the home, on the floor level, radiant heating under the exposed cement floor heats up the full bathing room and two bedrooms.
- In the loft-like 2nd level, sleek aluminum and stainless steel railings accent the bamboo stairway to the mezzanine, living room area and an artfully designed kitchen made with salvaged appliances and cabinetry.
- Passive cooling strategies like fans and clerestory windows allow residents to be cool during summer months and hot during winter.
- The roof includes 260 sq ft of photovoltaic panels that produce nearly 2,000 kilowatts of energy per year to a battery stored in the basement.
- The root have a 2-foot-square area planted with drought-resist to harvest rain .

This single family home was constructed in 6 months and won a 2009 American Institute of Architects merit award and the 2010 Green Building of the Year Award.

Now what? How can you convert your home into an eco-friendly home without investing too much money? If you're redesigning a home, execute an energy audit first to help you establish what energy efficiency changes should and can be made to your home. In this way you'll measure how much energy your home utilizes.

The authors favorite eco-friendly methodology is the passive solar cooling/heating design. Passive solar signifies that your home's windows, walls, and floors can be developed to collect, store, and distribute power from the sun in the form of heat in the winter season and reject solar heat in the summer season. Existing properties can be adapted or "retrofitted" to passively collect and store solar heat too. These five factors constitute a comprehensive passive solar home design:
- The Collector - The area through which sunlight enters the building (usually windows).
- The Absorber - The hard, darkened surface of the storage element. Sunlight hits the surface and is absorbed as heat.
- The Thermal Mass - The components that retain or store the heat produced by sunlight below or behind the absorber surface.
- The Distributor - The method by which solar heat circulates from the collection and storage points to different areas of the house.
- The Controller - Roof overhangs may be used to shade the aperture area during summer season or Thermostats that signal a fan to turn on.

About the writer - Cynthia Booth shares knowledge for the architecture careers advice blog. It's a nonprofit website dedicated to provide help for beginning designers who need resources for their careers. With this she would like to increase the awareness on eco-friendly home design and change the general public idea of energy efficiency.

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