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Tips for Reducing your Carbon Footprint for your Commercial Property

Posted on 8 September, 2011 by MOVEHUT

Many businesses are wasting hundreds if not thousands of pounds a year by wasting energy in their commercial properties.This issue does not only affect their profit margins, but also the environment. Movehut looks into how businesses can reduce their carbon footprint and save money in the long term.

Edwina Hart, Health Minister expressed, “Being more energy efficient is not only good for the environment, but also helps to reduce costs and save money.” So what can a business do to save energy in their commercial property?

The first aspect that a business needs to address is their employee attitudes. Many people do not care if a computer is left switched on or a tap is left running in acommercial property as they are not paying the bill themselves. So foremost you should make it company policy to comply with energy efficiency and you should brief employees on how they can reduce their carbon footprint at work, no matter how big or small the change might be.

Some basic changes that a business can make are:

• switching off unused equipment, such as; computers, monitors, lights, radios, taps, heating and air conditioning units, just to name a few
• checking equipment regularly – for instance, if a refrigeration system is not regularly defrosted or the seals are tattered, it will be working harder than it needs to and using more energy to do so
• ensuring equipment does not conflict – for example, some businesses turn the heating on, forgetting that the air conditioning is already switched on.

 

Once you have the basics sussed, there are a number of products that can be implemented in your commercial property to reduce your carbon footprint, such as:

• automatic controls – these sense when someone enters a room and turns on the light automatically. They will also turn off a light after a short delay of detecting no movement
• replace regular light bulbs with more energy efficient bulbs – many companies are against using energy efficient light bulbs as they take a while to warm up, making the building look dull and gloomy in a morning.

There are many other energy saving tips that can be implemented, but it does really depend on the type of business and commercial property you have. For instance, if you run a heated swimming pool, it would be beneficial to implement a heated pool cover, which could save around 10-30 per cent of the total pool energy use per year.

But many techniques to reduce a business’s carbon footprint are mainly down to the basics listed above. You do not necessarily need to spend hundreds of pounds on fancy gadgets; just simply change the business and employee attitudes towards wasting energy.

 

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