What Business Can Do

Building a Sustainable Business

Short Term Wins

• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - 80% of Small Businesses recycle yet another £1.4billion (GBP) could be saved every year through further recycling.
• Get a Green Audit - The Carbon Trust will perform a free energy audit for any Business spending more than £50,000 (GBP) a year on energy. Smaller Businesses can get interest-free loans, advice and information packs.
• Contact the Energy Saving Trust for free onsite energy, waste and water audits
• Go to www.businesslink.gov.uk for an interactive tool for helping Business reduce cost
• Go to the Forum for Private Business web site at www.fpb.org for their Utility Switching Service. The average saving per year is £1,275 (GBP) per Business. However, for true sustainability switch to a Renewables Tariff.
• Switch your PC's OFF at the mains when you leave the office. For each PC you have this will save you £35 (GBP) per year
• The average Business can easily cut energy bills by 20%
• Replace all light bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) for a 75% reduction in lighting costs
• Switch off all non-essential equipment when not in use. A typical office waste enough energy in ONE night to run a small car for 100 miles
• Cut heating - lower the thermostat by 1 degree and save enough energy to print over 400 million sheets of A4 paper
• Fit timers to water coolers and vending machines to reduce their energy requirements by 70%
• Go to www.envirowise.gov.uk

Develop your Low Carbon Business Culture

• Go to www.carbontrust.co.uk/enterprises to see how changing your employee behaviour makes your Business greener
• Build in green targets as part of all employee objectives and offer incentives for reaching those goals
• Teach Company drivers to drive their cars efficiently and reward low mileage not high mileage
• Delegate waste and energy saving duties to each employee
• Ensure each room has its own heating/cooling control and light switch - make sure that all heat, air-conditioning and lighting is switched off when rooms are vacated. Make somebody or everybody responsible for communal areas.
• When the sun shines, switch the lights off - think, do you need it?
• Have a switch-off culture rather than the more normal Business culture of "more-is-better"
• Visit www.eonenergyefficiency.com and download their free Energy Manager's Action Plan
• Visit our own www.carbon-cutters.com for advice on living a post-carbon life

Go Local - Go Post-Carbon

• Calculate your Carbon Footprint per Employee and set targets for reduction
• Insert facts about your per employee Carbon Footprint into you Company Reporting and publish it on your web site. Compare it to comparable companies in your sector
• Measure performance of reductions against targets
• Include externalities in your accounting - start thinking about how far products and services have had to travel before reaching your offices
• Source as much resource as you can locally - local employees, local companies, local raw materials - factor in the distance travelled
• Encourage teleworking
• Discourage commuting by car
• Cut your need for transport - especially through City Centres effected by Congestion and Emissions-based charging
• Ditch Company Car schemes unless you are offering Cars in the top twenty low-CO2 Emitters league - go to www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk to find out
• Remove other 'perverse subsidies' for fossil fuel usage
• Use electronic communications such as Electronic Invoicing and E-Banking
• Market your products and services to local people
• Dematerialise your business - think small and local, not big and global
• Cut air travel to the barest minimum - send your Sales Team to a kick-off at a local Hotel rather than one in South Africa
• When you do need Air-Travel offset it by donating money to forestry projects on donate money to charities in poorer countries who invest in solar oven and energy efficient ovens
• Build networks of semi-autonomous Business-nodes independent of the center. A small Business is an efficient Business
• Devolve responsibility from the center to the edges
• Consider getting your energy from local sources - some companies have built wind turbines and fitted photo-voltaic panels on their factory roofs
• If you can't bring your customers to you - move to where your customers are - this may mean much smaller and more numerous local Business Units
• Create your own Company Policies on Energy Efficiency and consider "small, slow & local" within your future Business Strategies
• Disinvest in unsustainable Business requiring long-distance transport or energy intense activity
• Invest in sustainable Business requiring low energy inputs within a local environment

Consider Monetary Sustainability

Why? Seemingly endless growth has been built into our Business and Economic paradigm so much so that our monetary system will not work unless the economy grows. Any growth failure will lead to a crash. Previous crashes have been overcome through traditional fiscal measure such as injecting Government cash-reserves into the economy. This assumes that growth will be resumed and that the crash is only a temporary event - a bubble bursting, soon to be replaced by a new bubble.

Sadly, without injections of large amounts of renewable energy our economies will struggle to pull themselves out of such a depression. Therefore it has been seriously, proposed for the last 200 years, that the money supply return to Governmental control and away from Private Banks. Such a need has been recognised by famous Economists and even US Presidents but has never entered the public domain for debate, let alone the Business community for consideration. Few are even aware that such reform is necessary, largely because the current paradigm benefits the private Banks hence it is not in their interest to see the system change. Banks cannot manufacture Debt in a shrinking economy. Thus the money supply collapses and, so with it, the economy. The alternative is to have the Government spend the money supply into existence. This process used to drive the economies of the world until it was effectively 'privatised' by Banks. In the interests of economic stability, in a changing world, it will become essential that this control is restored if collapse is to be averted.

For more on this vitally important (yet tragically ignored) debate visit some of the following web sites:

• www.sustecweb.co.uk
• www.monetary.org
• www.moneyreformparty.org.uk
• www.prosperityuk.com
• www.monetaryreform.org

So, what can this mean to Business?

• Raising money, for Business investment, through creating debt may come a permanently difficult thing to do
• Business growth will increasingly be self-financed, hence a lot slower
• Profits in the Banking sector will decline
• Businesses working to finance large debts will collapse unless adjustments are made
• Hence Debt-reduction will become a prudent policy
• All Business should dig its way out of debt by around 2020
• Do everything you can to support Monetary Reform if you expect to continue in Business

Krofire Enterprises Ltd is an internally financed business free of debt. Therefore it will weather the storm and sustain. We support Monetary Reform.