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At the beginning of 2023, Blue Cabin formed an Environment Working Group, which included three staff members and one of our trustees. Our aim was to become more conscious of our environmental impact, and then consider if, and how, we can make any changes – big or small – to improve our carbon footprint.
Here, Amy Armstrong shares how we’ve started changing our environmental habits.
We like a challenge! We started with a mapping exercise, trying to list everything and anything that might count as having an environmental impact. There are the obvious things that can be measured, such as travel, waste etc. and then the less obvious things, like cloud storage. It was news to us all that cloud storage has to have physical storage somewhere!
Throughout this whole process, one of the biggest challenges we have faced is that our core team works almost 100% from home. This is fairly unusual, and therefore much of the advice and guidance on how organisations can reduce their carbon footprint simply isn’t relevant to us. We don’t have a shared office, therefore we cannot measure gas, electricity and water usage in the same way as an organisation that does.
Of course we all have household bills, but the complexity of working out what percentage of our household bills contributes to the carbon emissions of Blue Cabin is virtually impossible.
In addition to this, and perhaps more importantly, we had to consider whether it’s even appropriate to intrude on people’s private lives to make that calculation. Is it reasonable to ask people to consider how much they are heating their home office? Or how much they are recycling? We decided it wasn’t, but what we could do was to encourage, suggest and inspire people to make small manageable changes that would hopefully collectively make a bigger difference.
As part of a recent staff away day, we had a great idea to support our environment and sustainability work by inviting staff to bring up to five items that they no longer wanted, needed or used, to swap with things other members of the team had to offer. The idea of things being reused and recycled appealed to the team, and this was the perfect opportunity to stop things going to landfill.
Items people brought ranged from clothes and toys, to stationery and crockery. On the day we displayed the treasures for everyone to peruse and built in time for the swapping to take place.
Everyone was initially asked to select up to five items to take home, though in reality people ended up with much more! Anything that was left was either taken home, or donated to a charity shop.
Everyone agreed this was a great addition to our away days, so we will plan to do this annually going forward!
Sometimes we’re up against other priorities for making decisions about what we buy, where we hold events, how we travel and so on.
There will be times that we simply don’t have time to research the most appropriate supplier, because that thing that we have to buy is needed urgently. We won’t always be able to book the venue we want, because it is not available on the day the project has to happen.
Overall, our aim is to slowly but surely begin to change habits. If we normally buy our paper from a certain supplier, perhaps we could take a moment to check if there is another supplier that can provide us with a good deal on recycled paper? Do we even need to print that document in the first place?!
Alongside our sustainability work we have had support from Investors in the Environment, to help us to find ways to reduce our environmental impact. We are in the process of going for a Bronze Award, and we very much hope that this is the start of our journey to becoming the most environmentally friendly organisation we can be, and hopefully inspiring other organisations, even home-working ones like ours, that things can be achieved with a collective mindset to do things a little bit differently.
