10 Steps to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Business

Page 21 STEP 06: REDUCE YOUR EMISSIONS The second option is to green your production or consumption. Rather than lowering absolute numbers, you can switch to environmentally friendly alternatives. For example, you could send more waste to recycling, instead of sending it to landfill or incineration. Or you could switch from fossil fuels to more environmentally friendly fuel. In the latter option, you do not actually reduce overall consumption or production, but switch to less carbon-emitting alternatives. The best option depends on your situation. If your organization is already advanced in reducing waste and there is little room for improvement, you may want to explore environmentally friendly disposal methods. Of course, preventing consumption or production in the first place is the preferred option as you completely eradicate the associated emissions. When you switch to environmentally friendly alternatives, your emissions will be minimized but rarely zero. For example, switching to recycling waste from landfill will prevent certain emissions associated with landfill. However, as the recycled waste still needs to be transported and then processed, it still generates emissions. Preventing waste generation in the first place would be the only way to eliminate the vassociated emissions. When starting to implement, make sure to monitor and report progress from the beginning. Most likely, you will have presented a proposal to key stakeholders within the organization in which you have set out a specific amount of savings, both for CO2 and cost, using your baseline study as the starting point. You need a system to track the savings regardless of which aspects you are focusing on. You will get asked for the results – a lot. Besides proving your case, getting the tracking and reporting in place is absolutely crucial for securing continued support to your initiative. LM WIND POWER’S APPROACH TO REDUCING EMISSIONS Our internal reductions strategy focused on energy efficiency, and we assigned a dedicated global energy efficiency manager to drive it. A few years in advance, we had already conducted a study by an external expert that showed us a significant potential saving from a number of energy efficiency measures. With this in mind, we initiated a program of site visits by our internal energy team and our external partner. They went to six of our sites to assess the situation in detail, working with the local colleagues who would eventually become responsible for implementing the identified reduction measures. A significant potential for cost and CO2 savings were identified and each site had their own report which would specify the current energy consumption, the measures already in place and what it would mean to put energy saving measures in place. Keen to contribute and become even more efficient, the plants agreed to take this additional challenge on. Three initiatives were presented to the Management Team as enablers of double digit energy and CO2 savings. These initiatives had to be presented as any other business case and were assessed on the exact same merits as any other investment in our manufacturing facilities. We identified the projects with the biggest impact at the lowest cost. It turned out to be a significant challenge to determine the expected savings potential and pay back. None of the plants had energy management systems (EMS) granular enough to indicate exactly how much the initiatives we would implement would contribute. So, one of the first initiatives was to install an EMS that allows us to track in much more detail how the factories consume their energy. This enables us to compare consumption to output, observe deviations and thus find areas for improvement. Ultimately, we will be able to see how individual initiatives influence energy consumption worldwide. The other two initiatives were process based ventilation control and shifting to LED lighting.