10 Steps to Make Your Business Climate Friendly & Achieve Net Zero

As companies reopen with new Covid-19 regulations, nearly all will be making some fundamental changes to how they do business given the new landscape and changing consumer sentiment. Things are going to be quite different. Further, all businesses have a requirement to achieve Net Zero – i.e. your overall business activities need to be carbon neutral.

Employees and customers not only require higher standards of public hygiene but they will also be turning to businesses that are environmentally conscious. Being an environmentally responsible business, with environmentally sound practices, products and services will become the new norm. Try and get ahead of it.

We have created a simple action plan to help businesses adopt some simple steps to getting climate ready and to achieve NetZero.

Here are our 10 Steps to Make Your Business Climate Friendly:

  1. Switch to renewable energy in your office, factories, vehicle fleets and tools. There are a growing number of green energy suppliers so finding the right one for your needs is quite easy. Also, electric vehicles and tools are becoming much more pervasive.
  2. Hire on-site employees who live within a cycle commute – the rest could work from home. Help keep pollution down and fully embrace the new ways of working. Now that you have had a few months to put in place successful home working routines and processes during the Coronavirus lockdown it’s time to lock those benefits in.
  3. Minimise waste and recycle everything you can. The Zero Waste movement is starting to pick up some steam – try and adopt what is practical in an office setting. Become a single use plastics free business.
  4. Lease an eco-office, warehouse or factory with a zero carbon footprint. At a minimum make sure your office is as well insulated as possible for the winter and allows as much sunlight, for natural warming, during the late spring and summer. That way you will use less energy heating your offices.
  5. Train employees in DSP’s 10 steps to Help Solve the Climate Change Crisis.
  6. Rewild your green areas. Plant trees, shrubs and wild grasses – the combination of the three provides the basic habitats for wildlife and insects. Place benches in nature to support employee wellbeing.
  7. Train your company leaders in the methods and approaches to developing environmentally conscious behaviours, practises and products. 
  8. Source eco materials and local supplies wherever possible from environmentally conscious suppliers. 
  9. Organise team meetings and away days at eco-friendly hotels and venues. Try to set up outdoor meeting spaces and actively support outdoor meetings when employees, suppliers or customers are at your offices.
  10. Measure the improvements and accomplishments you are achieving on the road to becoming fully climate friendly on a 6 monthly basis and communicate your progress to employees and customers.

Building an environmentally conscious organisation is an exciting process and one which will prove highly satisfying for you and your organisation. Done right, it will also add considerable value to your products or services as well as your brand. Include all your stakeholders in the journey – it could prove quite empowering and motivational.

At DSP we help organisations and individuals to become more climate friendly and adopt healthier living approaches. We offer a cost effective online app, DSP Online, to help you better understand how to become environmentally conscious with simple actionable techniques gleaned from the day to day approaches and learnings at DSP’s center of excellence in the UK southwest. Sign up to DSP Online today – CLICK HERE.

A Miracle Cure for the Climate Change Crisis

This weekend I had one of those sleepless, tossing and turning kinda nights. You know, the one where your mind spins like a Corona press conference while your body sweat shop’s like an Amazon warehouse. Then, suddenly, as if by magic I awoke to a place of peace and calm and magical light bulbs. That place where your deepest insights surface and everything suddenly seems to make karmic sense. Where colours are brighter, sounds are intensified and smells are, well, orgasmic right to the point where you sadly came to realise that you’re not tripping with the Kardashians but instead lying on an old pair of socks. I wasn’t in heaven or hell or even Nigella Lawson’s kitchen, I was being struck by that proverbial light bulb moment.

You see, it had suddenly hit me that the most prophetic crisis of our life time, the one that makes Corona look like a nat on a flea on a Mexican bottled beer, had found its miracle cure. The climate change crisis had discovered it’s Viagra, it’s hydroxychloroquine, it’s Trumpian antidote without needing to figure out how to turn his ceaseless twitter thing off. Cos the climate crisis has discovered its very own cure and its called Covid-19. Yes, Coronavirus, may be a pain up the human butt, but it could also prove to be the ultimate cure for our planet. Nature’s way of rebalancing itself. You know, just like Dave boy Attenborough or Tonto or my meditation instructor told me so.

And can you blame nature? Well, 3 odd million people probably can echoed by a horrifying amount of deceased, but perhaps it’s nature’s ultimate wake up call screaming out ‘Christ alive if we have to wait for the UN to come up with a coherent plan to solve global warming you won’t need Nigella’s dream convection heated cook top to boil the water, you’ll just dunk the pasta in the sea. And forget farting to get the hot tub going, our global warming will have it to the point where losing the mother in law takes on a whole new in-tub dimension’.

You see, the planet couldn’t wait any longer for us mortals to come up with a plan to save it or for Bozzer to host a conference in Glasgow so it invented its very own miracle cure. And, to be honest, you couldn’t have figured out a more perfect way to solve this climate thingy than Covid. It’s like it was purpose built for it. You know, better designed than an iPhone. More purpose built than a Bovis home. Or better fitting than Pamela Anderson’s bikini.

You see, experts have told us that the four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet (sorry MickeyD), avoid air travel (sorry I’m-really-Rich-Branson), live car-free (sorry everyone), and have fewer children (sorry MickeyD again). Coronavirus miraculously tackles all four simultaneously. The plant based diet thingy mostly because we’ll all be so broke that we’ll only be able to afford to eat the grass off our lawn. The having kids thing cos no one wants to have sex in lockdown and after that who in the world would want to have sex ever again just to risk having kids around for the next lockdown – sorry to say it again but have you met my teenagers? And for the answer to the air travel and being car-free part go back to the plant-based diet bit. BTW it really will mean car-free (not care-free) – i.e. bye bye Formula 1 or go karting dependent on how old you are. Unless, of course, your Lewis Hamilton in which case your gonna be depressed as shit either way cos your little enough to do both.

But Corona, the miracle cure for the climate crisis, doesn’t just stop there. Oh no, its got us all so shit scared of bat’s and pangolins and any other friggin wild virus carrying creature and we’re so super friggin terrified of forests that we’ll never go anywhere near one again which deals with the whole habitat destruction thingy. And as if that wasn’t enough, it looks like all the predators on the planet are gonna rise up and eat us as thanks to Corona they’ll have figured out that they’ve got us on the run and that we’re not quite as smarty pants and dominating as we conned them into thinking we were. And, as if we needed another nail in our human coffin, they’ll hone in on the fact that we must be an even lower form of sub species given the morons we’ve chosen as leaders to get us through this Corona crisis. So they’ll hoover up enough of us to permanently deal with the over-population and car and travel things and pretty much any other human created climate hell in a basket invention we came up with over the last 100 years. At least those of us that survive might get to keep this planet.

I think when I die, which by the look of things could be pretty soon, I’ll return as a bat.

If you enjoy these posts on ‘Surviving’ all I ask is for you to support a vital Climate Change project, called DSP, by giving just £3 or just over $3 per month. To find out more CLICK THIS LINK.