The Carbon Literacy Project

At Drive Green we have be advocates of the Carbon Literacy Project for a number of years now – huge fans of the work this charity is doing in order to help build awareness of climate change, and to encourage individual actions to help reduce our carbon impact.

“An awareness of the carbon costs and impacts of everyday activities and the ability and motivation to reduce emissions on an individual, community and organisational basis.”

Where the Carbon literacy Project is quite unique is that it has focused on employers and businesses being the key to spreading the message to their employee audiences.

“Creating employee engagement in the organisation’s goals to become greener is critical to success”

This I think is very clever as it uses the structure of businesses and the nature of employment as to facilitator of employees completing this course.  This is a way of reaching a large group of people in a very in depth way.  The effective and behaviour changing results that follow the staff completion of the course and then spread further to friend and family, hopefully leading to an even greater reach of the awareness of what needs to be done and what can be done by everyone to help reduce our individual carbon footprints.

Equally the focus on businesses means that this is the catalysts for further sustainability change within these organisations, leading to a reduced carbon footprint of the business concerned due to the implementation of carbon reduction policies and practices.

“The Carbon Literacy Project can help you make your business greener.”

If you are looking to make your business genuinely greener, then working to become a Carbon Literate organisation is a very good way to go about it.  Not only will it help you as a business come up with ideas for change, it will also increase employee engagement with your green goals, and better still it will create via your employees a far greater awareness of the importance of carbon footprint reduction.

An organisation uses this status to better interact with its communities – whether they are staff or customers, neighbours, learners, suppliers or stakeholders. There are four levels of accreditation; Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, reflecting increasing levels of Carbon Literacy commitment and achievement within an organisation. A Carbon Literate Organisation will typically experience decreased in-house energy and resource consumption, improved organisational profile, healthier and happier staff, a healthier working environment, a safer supply chain, lower variable costs, enhanced competitiveness, and reduced commercial risk. CLO accreditation also demonstrates an organisation’s corporate social responsibility in the clearest possible way.

Despite this the staff having all completed a Carbon Literacy course, has gained even more staff engagement in the business’s mission to be as green as possible and to continue to spread the green message. 

Following completing the course the team discussed what extra things they think they can and should be doing to reduce the businesses carbon footprint.  Unlike a lot of organisations this is made a bit more challenging for them, because we do and have always done so much to make the business as carbon neutral as possible.

One suggestion that we will be implementing is the reduction of printing done as part of our internal processes.  Whilst recycled papers and paper recycling is already being done, this all takes energy that can be saved by reducing printing. We went through what we can reduce and have estimated that we can reduce our regular administrative printing by 75% in buying, 50% in sales, 50% in admin and almost 100% in accounts.  

The second is the reduction of single use plastics being brought into work by the staff.  Previously for 12 months, we ran an individual incentive where each staff member was paid £2 for each day they didn’t bring anything into the office that involved single-use packaging.  This was very effective, however when I stopped the payment (hoping behaviours were now changed after a year) the team immediately went back to their old ways. I am very pleased to say that following the course the team would like to do this again, however this time without any individual incentive.  This time for every day the whole team don’t bring in anything in single use packaging I am going to put £5 into a staff social fund. This will mean it is logged daily by the staff and recorded monthly in our KPI’s, so we can monitor its success and I am hoping that group accountability will make it more long term successful, and present a good example for other businesses to follow.

For further examples of what we do at Drive Green to reduce our carbon footprint, please visit the ‘green things we do’ section of the website and watch the video there.  Hopefully there are lots of great ideas and a very useful approach for businesses to follow who wish to be greener.

Contact the Carbon Literacy Project

If you are genuinely keen to make your business greener and keen to make and even wider contribution to public awareness of the importance of carbon footprint reduction, then please do get in touch with the Carbon Literacy Project.