On the right track

2 July, 2010

Increasingly, regulation is requiring businesses across every sector to consider the greenhouse gas emissions for which they are responsible. The facilities management industry is no different, which is resulting in a change in the expectations upon facilities managers. While there are compliance issues to be addressed, there are also opportunities for efficiency, cost savings and competitive advantage.

So how can you benefit from carbon measurement? The clearest benefit arises from the opportunity to improve processes and reduce costs through analysing your organisation’s carbon footprint. Carbon footprinting provides a fresh perspective on an organisation’s systems, and unrealized opportunities for efficiency gains invariably become apparent during the process.

There are frequently quick wins for facilities managers to make in the areas of lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning, with shared gains for both the financial and carbon bottom lines.

Satisfying your tenants is also a key driver for addressing the emissions arising from your facility, whether you are an in-house or external facilities manager.

If you are an external FM, there are market opportunities to be realised, both in retaining tenants or leasing vacant facilities. Tenants will become increasingly demanding regarding the facilities that they lease, and will need their buildings to assist in achieving their own deep cuts in carbon emissions. Further, engaging with your tenants regarding their carbon emissions provides an opportunity to add value to your service offering.

If you are an internal FM, you can assist in delivering efficiency and contributing to your organisation’s overall environmental policy. Associated knock-on benefits exist for your organisation, its reputation, market position and even the value placed on you as facilities manager.

In summary, going beyond compliance with carbon management isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s good business strategy.

Compliance issues
There have been two key developments in government policy regarding corporate carbon emissions in the past year, both of which directly affect facilities managers.

The first has been the commencement of the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme. This directly affects over 20,000 large organisations across the UK, requiring a large number of them to report their annual electricity consumption, and around 5000 to participate in a system that will place a price on their carbon emissions.

The second, affecting all organizations across the UK, is the release of government standards for corporate greenhouse gas emissions reporting. Government now recommends that all organizations publicly report greenhouse gas emissions, and is considering whether corporate carbon emissions reporting will be made mandatory under the Companies Act 2006.

FMs need to understand where their work fits within the broader context of the carbon footprint. How can you contribute to tracking and – crucially – reducing emissions in partnership with your tenants?

Once you have identified a need to address the carbon emissions associated with your facility, you should pinpoint your carbon hotspots. Measure your emissions at the beginning of your carbon planning process to ensure that you have identified the correct priority areas. You can then target these for emissions reductions and guarantee that your initiatives optimise the use of your time and maximise the carbon reduction potential.

If you are measuring emissions in-house, Best Foot Forward’s free Footprinter carbon measurement software tool can help. Fully compliant with the DEFRA guidance on organisational greenhouse emissions reporting, Footprinter is available online, has an intuitive, simple user interface and automatically analyses the data you enter, providing graphs and a PDF summary of your results. Importantly, it allows you to analyse the effect of different scenarios on your total carbon footprint and prioritise your action areas.

It is absolutely key to ensure, when measuring, that you choose a variety of benchmarks, as this can have an enormous influence on the results. The two charts demonstrate this using a range of office footprint studies.

If you compare the carbon footprint results per square metre of Client A with those of various other office environments, Client A appears to be a good performer, indeed, approaching best practice. However, if you compare the results per staff member, a very different story emerges, with Client A’s performance closer to the typical office than best practice.

Taking action
To be effective, the carbon footprint must be seen as the start of the process, not the endpoint. Once you have identified your carbon hotspots, the critical task is to translate what you have learned into a series of initiatives with measurable benefits for you and your tenants.

Where the quick wins are depends on you and your facility. You may control hard facilities, or a mixture of both hard and soft facilities. Your facility may be heritage-listed or a new build. These factors will dictate what you can control.

You may wish to appraise your options in both cost and carbon terms, enabling you to prioritise the initiatives which will maximise the benefits. The options are endless, but some typical early action areas for reducing the emissions associated with hard facilities include:

• Lighting: switching from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent can achieve an eightfold saving in power, and LEDs can deliver power consumption as low as one-20th of an incandescent globe.

• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning: maintaining plant equipment to ensure that it is operating at maximum efficiency is comparatively easy to implement, requires little or no capital outlay and can deliver significant savings.

• Shared areas: many facilities managers directly control stairwells, corridors and toilet areas. Introducing lighting sensors and reconsidering the need for heating in stairwells can deliver quick wins.

It’s crucial that you monitor and evaluate the success of the actions you implement, and document the results that you have achieved. Tracking progress through a tool such as Footprinter not only shows you are heading in the right direction, it also provides a resource for communicating with tenants regarding the improvements that you are making to their facility.

Ultimately, the greatest savings can be achieved in collaboration with tenants, and your action plan could include a longer-term goal to involve your tenants directly in a shared emissions reduction plan. Whether you are an in-house facilities manager or an external contractor, adding this collaborative element to your service offering will likely strengthen your relationship with tenants, resulting in mutually beneficial outcomes.