The Envirometer leads to cost savings

Spijkstaal Elektro have been using the Envirometer since moving to their new premises:

In the current situation every company needs to cut its costs, so why not include environmental costs in the equation too? That way you can kill two birds with one stone!

The Envirometer provides a completely transparent review of your environmental costs. Armed with this degree of insight, it's a simple matter to develop policies to reduce those costs and also take pressure off the environment.

Our licenses are full of pretty abstract operating requirements. With the Envirometer our accounts department now prepares compact reviews with which one can really get to work at the nuts and bolts level.

The Envirometer clearly shows that when our company moved into new premises we made major environmental progress. The footprint associated with our energy consumption fell by half, even though we doubled the capacity of our paint-shop. Our energy costs have gone down by 20%. Without the Envirometer these figures would have been very hard to derive from company records. So it's a tool to be recommended!

We've now incorporated the Envirometer as a performance indicator in our ISO9001:2000 quality system. Having been re-audited in March 2004, we now hold the certificate with zero yellow cards. Our auditor was very enthusiastic about the Envirometer; it was the first time he'd seen such a clear and practical system.

The Envirometer as a tool for environmental care

There are a number of ways the Envirometer can be used in the context of environmental care, including:

• Priority-setting
  (Is energy or hazardous waste the number one priority?)
• Target-setting 
  (Over the next three years we want to reduce our environmental impact by 15%.)
• Monitoring the impact of environmental measures 
  (Has the new heating plant indeed given the 10% savings promised?)
• Tracking environmental performance from year to year 
  (We see a declining trend in our hazardous waste; 2006 was an exception.)
• Comparing environmental performance with others in the same sector or among different branches of your company
  (Our electricity consumption is 10% above average and we generate far more waste than our other branches.)
• Seeking a balance between environment and costs
  (Separating our plastics waste comes at no extra cost, but means a 2% improvement in eco-efficiency.)
• Staff motivation
  (Thanks to your efforts we now have 10% less metals waste and therefore need to buy 10% less raw materials.)
• Communication with external parties like environmental departments, project principals, customers, clients or the general public
  (Inclusion of the Envirometer chart in your (social) annual report.)

Priority-setting

The Medical Centre of the Amsterdam Free University was looking for a registration system that could also help establish environmental policy priorities. The Envirometer was just the job for pursuing these two goals. Thanks to the Envirometer it emerged that:

• tackling electricity consumption is the top priority, with a major contribution in terms of both environmerntal impact and costs;
• gas consumption is the second priority;
• commuting is another key environmental aspect;
• (waste)water and commercial waste offer far less scope for environmental gains.

This analysis was used by the Centre to elaborate an environmental programme for the coming years. 

Another example is that the Envirometer is often a real eye-opener for office organisations when it comes to paper consumption, with the Envirometer chart showing that paper use accounts for no more than a few percent of overall environmental impact at the very most. Electricity and gas consumption, transport and commercial waste are far more important environmental issues. If decisions are being based on environmental considerations, these issues should therefore be given priority. There may of course well be other factors that mean that action still needs to be taken to reduce the amount of paper being used, such as irritation, amount of archiving space, or costs.

Setting and monitoring targets

With the aid of the Envirometer it's a simple matter to draw up environmental targets that can then be monitored. These targets may be for the organisation's overall environmental impact or for one or more particular aspects. The aim might be to reduce the Envirometer score by 10% over the next three years, say. If the organisation's water consumption proves to be relatively high compared with others in the same field, for example, the target may be set of reducing staff water consumption to the average of 7 m³ per employee within a year.

Monitoring the impact of environmental measures

By insulating their roofs and installing a programmable thermostat, AVIM-TMO, wholesalers in commercial vehicle parts and brake-shoe repair centre, have managed to cut their gas bill by 13%! These savings were immediately visible on the Envirometer chart, providing solid evidence that the envisaged impact had indeed materialised.

Tracking environmental performance and responding to peaks

With your scores on the Envirometer and efficiency indicators, it is immediately clear how performance has changed compared with previous years. If your score on a particular indicator proves to have risen or fallen, you will obviously need to track down the reasons.

Has your consumption of off-peak electricity soared, for example? The question then is whether there has been more weekend working the past year, or whether plant or equipment has been left on overnight or at weekends.

Companies can expand and contract and so can their productivity, with their environmental impact often changing accordingly. And so the Envirometer also gives you charts corrected for number of employees, annual turnover and scale of production. If a peak in the amount of waste generated follows on from increased output, for example, the production-corrected chart might show that environmental impact per unit product remains unchanged.

Comparing environmental performance with others in the same sector or among company branches

The score of others operating in the same sector is obviously an interesting point of reference for assessing one's own environmental impact. With the efficiency indicators, this can be done for a host of environmental issues. If your off-peak electricity consumption is over 20%, for example, you'll see you're above the average for small and medium-sized businesses, and if your offices have managed to use 1.5 m³ gas per m³ you'll find you're up with the best scoring offices. To see the indicator scores for a range of sectors, check out the pages under the heading sector examples.

Using the Envirometer software, organisations from across different sectors, like offices, printshops, nursing homes, hospitals, mental health institutions or fire stations, can compare their own results with the cross-sectoral average. It is also a simple matter to compare the environmental performance of different branches of one's own organisation by comparing the respective charts. For instructions on use, see the Frequently Asked Questions. 

Seeking a balance between environment and costs

The Envirometer shows two charts: one for environmental impact, the other for environmental costs. This allows you to assess whether a particular measure is promising from an environmental angle, from a financial angle, or both. You can given a measure a 'dry run', for example. Simply copy the results from the previous year and play around with the numbers to assess the projected effects of the envisaged measure (extra waste separation, green electricity, new lighting...) in the impact and cost charts.