The Impact of Your Carbon Footprint
The quantifying and reduction of your company’s Carbon Footprint will become mandatory very soon. You will be asked to leave no stone unturned in a company wide effort to reduce carbon emissions. For those of you who operate large complexes such as power plants, the retrofitting that you could be asked to undertake to comply with a mandated cap on your energy use and then therefore carbon emissions, could cost millions to complete. You could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on scrubbers and refitting to convert your plant from the use of one fuel source to another.
Even Hospitals, Schools, Hotels and large Manufacturing Plants will need to invest capital to bring carbon emissions in line with carbon caps. Tools such as sub-meters will become necessary to gather a true picture of your company’s energy consumption. A review of your building’s insulation, windows and HVAC systems will need to be completed.
This is not to say that every change has to be monumental to impact your carbon footprint. There are many low or no cost changes that you make in the office areas of your plant. Remember things like recycling, passive solar, unplugging or turning off equipment, these add no costs and are easy to bring online. Motion sensors are another low cost item that can lower your lighting costs by eliminating the need for lighting to be operating in unoccupied rooms. This type of system is used widely now in the hotel business.
Shifts can also be made in an ongoing fashion inline with normal operations or capital improvements. In the regular rotation of your fleet of vehicles for example there is an opportunity to shift to the use of alternative fuels, electric vehicles or more fuel efficient conventional fuel vehicles. These shifts are part of the annual operating budget and are implemented with less impact to bottom line than something like a newly mandated retrofit.
The footsteps you hear behind you will be the echo of you own carbon footprint and it will be up to you to reduce the impact of that footprint on your workers, community and your company’s bottom line.
