Is travelling necessary?
- Think twice before you travel to meetings. Encourage your employees to check their routes – they could consider walking, using public transport or jumping on a bike to cover short distances! You can even plan a healthier walking route that avoids the most polluted roads using the clean air route finder.
- With advances in technology, many SMEs are well-equipped for employees to work from home. Not only does this offer flexibility to your employees but it also eliminates the carbon emissions produced during the commute.
- Do you know how your employees get to and from work? Find out by using an easy template transport survey.
Get on your bike
- Have you got the facilities for employees to lock and safely leave their bikes? If so, encourage them to cycle to work – it’s a great form of exercise, it can help reduce stress and it boosts your mood.
- Getting a Santander Cycles business account means your employees who don’t have their own bikes can use one for a free 30 minutes a day.
- Dr Bike offers subsidised rates to get experienced mechanics into offices to check everything on bikes from brakes to tyre pressure, so you can make sure employees can safely ride. If you’re based in a shared office why not team up on this service, so your whole building benefits?
- Offer your employees an affordable way to buy a bike – there’s a guide to getting started on the Cycle to Work scheme here.
On the road
- Replace company cars with membership to a car club like Zipcar, DriveNow and Enterprise Car Club.
- Use a company taxi account that uses zero emission vehicles. Green Tomato Cars is on track to have London’s largest zero emission fleet in 2019. GLH uses a mix of electric and hybrid cars to transport people and packages across the city.
Your deliveries
- Does your waste collector have a policy on minimising journeys and miles travelled? Do they use low emission vehicles? If they don’t, ask them to!
- Make sure your goods are delivered cleanly and safely by switching to a cycle courier scheme such as CitySprint, Gnewt, Pedivan, Pedal Me and Pedals.
- Encourage your employees to think about their own carbon footprint. A simple switch they can make is choosing Click and Collect instead of having parcels delivered to work. This reduces the number of freight vehicles on the road and helps employees to be more eco-friendly about their purchases.
Air travel
- Do you really need to take that flight? Travel, especially flights, can make up over half of a company’s carbon emissions. Using video conferencing instead can make a big difference – it’ll cut emissions and save money. If flying is unavoidable, book direct flights as take-off and landing creates most of an aircraft’s carbon emissions.
- Carbon offsetting is an internationally recognised way to take responsibility for unavoidable carbon emissions by contributing to projects that tackle poverty, improve health and protect the environment. ClimateCare can help you calculate and offset your carbon emissions.
This was updated in April 2019 by Heart of the City. We’ve created these resources for individual SMEs to use. None of our content is to be adapted, reused or repurposed for commercial use.
