Economy Seven Article - Spinnaker

We have both commercial and moral reasons to be as environmentally friendly as possible with our business. But the routes to achieving that are not always as easy as we would like.
 
We handle a lot of cardboard, paper and packaging in our business and currently recycle much of it. We give away some surplus packaging materials to a local charity and a storage company, for example. They both use the materials productively and it saves us the waste disposal costs.
 
We spent considerable time examining whether to invest in specialist plant and machinery to compact and bale some waste on site and sell it on. Before the investment was made the price of compacted waste fell sharply, making the proposal uneconomic.
 
That highlighted a couple of risks to us. We are not in the waste business so cannot claim to be expert in it and the more time we spend looking into such issues the greater the risk of management distraction away from our core business.
 
We are also keen to reduce our overall energy use. But, recognising we are not experts, we feel we need a proper assessment and cost/benefit analysis conducted before we can commit any of our business cash to expensive energy efficiency measures.
 
When we contacted one well-known government advisory service for assistance with the process, we failed their cost/benefit analysis. Our overall energy use was not high enough to justify them spending time helping us look at it!
 
That left us in a quandary as we have limited time to research individual issues without such assistance.
 
While the support to help us take the ‘right’ steps is not always there, we fear the green agenda will bring two substantial impediments to business: bureaucracy and cost.
 
For example, we pay over £1,000 a year to one government waste compliance scheme simply for them to collect and pass on a form that we have to fill in. We do not mind bearing costs that are necessary or do something useful for the country or environment. But the bureaucracy needs to be minimised and the costs need to achieve something real.
 
And those costs mount up. The plethora of government schemes is likely to cost all energy users substantial amounts of money over the long term. Could not a greater share of the costs be borne by the energy companies themselves?
 
All other businesses have to invest continuously to improve their business - and they don’t seem to have the energy companies’ ability simply to pass those costs straight through to the customer.