Are you serious about being carbon friendly?

Are you serious about your business being carbon friendly? Are you really making a difference or are you paying lip service to the concept. Do you have company vehicles? What can you do to reduce their carbon footprint? What are you doing about it? Here are some thoughts from a New Zealand perspective (where I have shown URL’s you will have similar services in your own country):

1.       In order to measure improvement, you need a baseline. Let’s start by measuring how many km you travel per month. Measure this over a year because there are always fluctuations. In addition to measuring km travelled, measure fuel consumption, i.e. km per litre of fuel. If you use fuel cards, you probably already have this information in your monthly reports. If you don’t maybe you should, fuel cards usually also offer discounts.

1.  Get your vehicles regularly serviced and tuned up. It’s easy to see the ones that aren’t, by the smoke and soot they trail behind them and especially trucks and buses that have huge black patches covering someone’s expensive advertising material.
2. Car pool. How often do you and your colleagues go to the same event in separate cars when you could have shared?
3. Drive by the most efficient route. There are many way to do this. If you have a car navigation system, you can usually select the fastest or the shortest route.  Note that the fastest route will usually have fewer stops such as intersection controls. You use far more fuel stopping and starting your car than you do when cruising. If you don’t have a car navigation system such as Navman or TomTom, the most reliable is to use a quality web site that offers driving directions such as www.aamaps.co.nz or www.wises.co.nz.
   
4. If you have multiple locations to visit, try to plan the most efficient route to visit all of them. One option for this is to use a site such as www.aamaps.co.nz that not only lets you create via points for your trip, it also allows you to re-order them to create a more efficient sequence.
5. When you are travelling to visit a client, see if there are other clients or prospects you can visit in their vicinity to save future trips. In the freight industry everyone knows that you should always try to find another load for the return trip.
6. If you have a vehicle doing multiple deliveries, using Route Optimisation you can establish the most efficient order to do them in. A furniture delivery truck using Route2Go from GeoSmart, could not only reduce travel distance, but also load the truck in the correct order to minimise the drivers workload. If you have multiple trucks, you can set a range of rules that decide which trucks do which jobs in which order and eliminate guesswork.
7. Using a Fleet Management system, fleet operators can view the location of their vehicles and ensure that the closest vehicle gets the job. Fleet Management solutions also monitor driver behaviour such as ‘clutch riding’ and excessive acceleration to assist in driver training.
8.  Trip planning on websites such as Wises and AA Maps can also assist with things like petrol and lunch stops, making sure they fit into the route rather than having to drive out of your way when the time comes. The same applies to finding a convenient car park rather than driving around in circles around your destination.

Simple proactive measures can have a huge impact on your carbon footprint and consequently on your profitability.  Vehicle service costs will be reduced along with the inconvenience of not having the vehicles on the road with reduced maintenance costs. Fuel costs will reduce and you will be able to fit more business into the same amount of time thereby increasing productivity. You will also earn the right to announce to the business world that you are genuinely playing your part in reducing your company’s carbon footprint.