Your Carbon Footprint that is…

We are proactive in reducing our carbon footprint and being aware of our impact and possibilities to reduce our impact on our environment.  In addition to trying our air travel, through Climate Friendly, and wanted to offset the emissions of our other (essential) emissions-intensive activities.

Climate Friendly works with corporations, businesses and individuals to measure, manage, and offset their carbon footprint, by  providing a quick and easy calculation tool, to take action immediately.  While these tools allow you to calculate offsets for flights, electricity and car travel, we wanted to offset more than those things, so we sent an email to Climate Friendly to see if they could help.  They quickly responded and sent us spreadsheet for us to fill in and  return to them to finish the calculations.

Before we could complete the spreadsheet, we needed obtain certain figures, make calculations and implement procedures to produce more accurate figures — so we thought we’d share how we went about doing it…

The first figure we tackled was our electricity, dividing the KW usage (from our electricity bill) by 5 working days, divided by the staff members.

For paper consumption, we went through our invoices and extracted all paper purchases i.e. A4 80gsm, A4 110gsm, FlipChart per 60gsm etc. worked out an average over the period of time and tracked it in a spreadsheet.

Taxi travel and freight figures were extracted from our cashflow reports from our accounting system.  For paper waste, we didn’t empty our 7 litre recycling bin for 4 weeks and measured how much we filled it for that period.

At the end of the day these figures are not absolute, but by continually measuring our consumption, our hope is that we’ll no longer be grappling for figures, working on guesstimates or making assumptions.  We’ll have a more comprehensive understanding of how big our footprint really is.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a workshop organised by the wonderful Dr Zoë Sofoulis and Justine Humphry of University of Western Sydney. Zoë and Justine have been working as part of the National Water Commission Fellowship for 2010-11 on the Cross-connections: Linking Urban Water Managers with Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Researchers (PDF 311 KB) project.

As the title of the programme suggests, the focus of the workshop was on how to connect social researchers with the water industry. It was a very interesting discussion, looking at the challenge from a variety of perspectives. For me it was an invaluable insight into the challenges of bringing the social sciences into a field that is largely driven by a more quantitative and engineering focused approach.

As part of the days proceedings, Zoë invited me to present a short segment on the use of design research methods for communicating and engaging with ethnographic and qualitative research. My presentation looked at mobile diaries (for which I recommend Penny Hagen and Natalie Rowland’s excellent Johnny Holland article as a backgrounder), personas, infographics and visualisations, customer journey mapping, storyboards. I also used Smart Design’s wonderful work for the FastCompany Biomimicry Challenge (embedded below) as an example of envisioning using video/animation, of particular relevance given the focus on urban water.

IBM Biomimicry Challenge from Smart Design on Vimeo.

Part of what Zoë and Justine have been working on is a Directory of Social and Cultural Research on Urban Water. Their work to date has focused on researching and collating the data for the directory, but they will soon be turning their attention to publishing it. It was during discussion on how this might be advanced that I was reminded again how valuable social technologies like wikis and rapid development frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django can be in providing low-cost publishing methods for this kind of work.

Thanks to Zoë and Justine for the invite — I’m looking forward to continuing the dialogue into the future.

Like many companies, we have a couple of old computers in the office that are no longer suitable for use by us and are wanting to dispose of them in an environmentally friendly way.

After doing a little bit of research we’ve found a couple of companies online offering such services — they pick up the items and pay you if they still work, can be refurbished and sold, they also destroy any data that’s on them. The services are:

• MRI (Aust) Pty Ltd
• Secure Computer Recycling & Disposal

We were wondering if anyone has had any experience with either company, or could suggest any others that might be worth considering?

We try to be proactive in sustainability and reduce and offset our carbon emissions (for flights, paper usage, transport usage — e.g. cabs etc.).  We are part of a shared office space in a corporate building, and although our hands may be tied in some areas, we feel it’s important to constantly find ways, even small ones, to lessen our carbon footprint.

We’ve just had to estimate our paper usage for offsetting with Climate Friendly which has also got us thinking about ways to reduce the amount of paper we use. We also recently completed the office mini assessment on greenbizcheck website — after hearing about GreenBizCheck at a CORNA meetup) — which also got us thinking (we scored 70% on the mini-assessment, and we’ll be looking into doing a full assessment soon).

With all this in mind I was entering some invoices into our Saasu online accounting file (full disclosure: we share our office with Saasu and some of our staff are shareholders), and I had an electronic invoice for wait for it $1.57. Steeped in traditional ways of “managing the books”, our process is to print the invoice, enter it into Saasu and then file the physical copy in a folder.  Well it was just irking me to have to print off this invoice for such a measly amount.

So Grant, Marc (from Saasu) and I ended up having a discussion about it, going paperless, the pro’s and cons, questions like: does is take more time to find the digital invoice in the system as opposed to just picking up the file that sits on my desk and flicking through the invoices to locate the hard copy?  Is it just a mindset that we have because we are just used to doing it a certain way? (Our experience is that, as much as we harp on about how we like change and want to stay current, humans in general hate change.) Do we need to keep paper copies of receipts etc. for legal reasons?

So we have set ourselves the challenge to do a 3-month trial of going paperless for our accounts, to see how we go.  Now I’m not going to bore you with everyday happenings, but I do hope to report back in a month or so to let you know how it’s all going, and see just how realistic the promise of paperless accounting might be…