Establishing Policies and Procedures for IT Use

We all come from different backgrounds, from different places, and we all have different experiences. It’s crucial therefore that we never make any assumptions about anybody, no matter how well we might think we know them, or no matter how well their certain demographic might be understood.

I have traveled the world and seen many different societies and cultures, but for as widely traveled as I would like to think of myself, having gone to the United States, Canada, around Europe, and to Scandinavia, I have never traveled to Africa, Asia, the Far East, Australasia, or South America. My closest friend has traveled much more widely than I have, having already visited Canada, Asia, New Zealand, and Kenya and who has spent a considerable amount of time in Cambodia in recent years, a place he considers a home from home.

Even he doesn’t understand some of the intricacies and complexities of the world however. To take one example, I want to look at my move from the UK to France in 2019. I decided, after 49 years living in and around England, that it was finally time to settle somewhere for my shall we say more mature years, and so I left the UK behind and moved to the French countryside.

I did this for several reasons. The UK was too overpopulated for my liking, and crime, antisocial behavior, and just plain selfishness had become an enormous problem since the financial crisis of 2008. The cost of living was also soaring, and if I wanted to move to the countryside in the UK, it would have cost me at many more times what it cost me in France. As an example, I purchased a 350-year-old cottage in the middle of deepest-darkest French countryside in 2020, and an equivalent property in the UK would have cost eight to ten times what I actually paid.

Then came time to apply for residency and to register for the French tax system. Now I already knew that France had one of the highest tax systems in Europe, with only Sweden coming in with higher taxes. What I never knew until I was embedded in this systems was what I would get for it.

Pensions, health care, roads, the environment, local services, all the things I care about the most in my own life were being given the attention, and indeed the money that they needed and deserved. While I had heard people over the years describe the UK as a tax haven, I finally realized they were right.

The tax take in the UK is a fraction overall of what other countries, including the United States, ask people to pay. Indeed, the UK is one of only a handful of countries that allow you to amend your business or self-employment income declaration after being told what tax you will pay for that, just in case you made a mistake of course.

Then we compare what services people in the UK get for their money, and the answer is very little. All of the reasons I chose to leave the UK, such as problems with the levels of policing, litter and fly-tipping on the streets, a lack of investment in education and health care, all came down to the small tax take. This problem is, of course, compounded by the fact that the British people are also broadly unaware of what happens in France and Sweden and that if you asked them to pay any more tax than they currently do, they’d throw their arms in the air and accuse you of being wholly unreasonable.

I then explained all of this to my much more widely traveled friend, and he freely admitted that it had just never occurred to him this might be the case, but that it certainly explained a lot about the state of public services in the UK.

This I feel is a very good, albeit a slightly long-winded, way to demonstrate why you should never make any assumptions about what people know and understand.

Start at the Beginning, but Don’t Dumb Down

Part of the process involved in educating people, but without making any assumptions about what they already know or understand, is to find the right way to pitch the subject. The best way normally is to find some way to relate it to their own lives. If people can find something relatable, they’ll find it to be much more understandable, and they’ll be more inclined to give it their full attention.

Where you start however can sometimes be a challenge. There might be a temptation to start with the “Janet and John bit,” where the subject is dumbed down to the point that a primary school child would be able to grasp the basics, or to develop far too much context and backstory. A good example of this latter point comes from the movie Airplane II: The Sequel (Paramount Pictures, 1982) where an airport official is asked for absolutely everything that’s happened up to that point. He hilariously replies, “Well, let’s see. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes.”

So finding the right place to start the conversation is always important. It’s also important that it be a conversation. Again this comes down to bring preachy, but in a less important manner I suppose. If you allow people to ask questions, then they will inevitably become more engaged.

Let’s look at the reason why people ask questions. It’s because they don’t know what or aren’t sure what the answer to that question is, and knowing that answer might fill some gaps in their own knowledge and help them understand the subject better and with a greater understanding of the overall context, which brings us neatly onto…

Context Is King

There is a very common phrase when it comes to education, journalism, and really to any profession where the exchange of information is involved, “context is king,” and it’s very true when it comes to educating people about climate change and what they can do themselves to reduce their impact on the environment and to help heal the planet we all rely on such heavily to keep us alive.

This all feeds back into making the subject relatable and relevant to the lives of the people you are speaking to. Let’s take the subject of deforestation as an example. You’ll probably find the people you are speaking to live in a large town or a city, perhaps in the suburbs, where forests are something you have to drive for several hours to visit and the kind of place you go to on a vacation.

Speaking about the problems of logging in the Amazon rainforest might seem thousands of miles away for some people and out of context for others as they think of the rainforest as being vast so can’t get their heads around how much logging takes place and how even a small amount of it can have a significant impact on the environment.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) describes forests as follows:

They provide food and shelter for so much of life on Earth – from fungi and insects to tigers and elephants. More than half the world’s land-based plants and animals, and three-quarters of all birds, live in and around forests.

Forests have a big influence on rainfall patterns, water and soil quality and flood prevention too. Millions of people rely directly on forests as their home or for making a living. But the risks from deforestation go even wider. Trees absorb and store carbon dioxide. If forests are cleared, or even disturbed, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Forest loss and damage is the cause of around 10% of global warming.

There are two points you can take here that people are able to relate to their own lives. The first is that stopping deforestation could cut the problems of global warming by up to 10%, but perhaps the most important is the effect it has on animals, birds, and insects.

Many people have heard of the global decline in the number of bees, for example, and what effect this can have on crops, harvests, and the food chain, but people also really do care about animals and birds. It tugs on their heart strings to think their habitats are being destroyed, and the emotional impact of this is something that can have a great effect on them.

Then we look at the use of coal and other fossil fuels. It might not bother the average person too much to think that the power stations producing electricity for their homes and businesses are being powered themselves by fossil fuels such as coal or gas.

There will be people in the room however that own electric cars or that they have worked hard to reduce their household waste. They might be very happy for their small contribution to the environment, but when it’s pointed out that their car is indeed a polluter, because the electricity used to power it in the first instance comes from the burning of fossil fuels, or that electricity they use at home comes from the burning of some of their household waste in local incinerators.

All of a sudden, their own contribution might not seem like much of a contribution at all, and that person might become much more involved with the subject matter at hand.

Teaching is a skill like any other. It is though often oversimplified as “importing knowledge or skills to another person, or group of people.” As a teacher myself this infuriates me, and I had strong words for some friends who trained as TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) tutors so they could work abroad.

The problem is that teaching is much more than just understanding the subject or having a prior qualification in it. In the case of English, it’s so much more than understanding the basic rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Teaching is a holistic skill that begins with three tenets:

• Assessment

• Observation

• Evaluation

You’ll notice that teaching isn’t actually mentioned at all in this list, because when you study for a teaching degree, while part of that will require in-service observation by your own tutors, to make sure you understand the principles and are implementing them correctly, you could be in a class with people who teach a broad variety of subjects from childcare to law.

I want to spend a little time then examining these three pillars of education, why they’re important, and how you can use them effectively in how you train and inspire the people around you.

Step 1: Assessment

Education begins with assessment. This is used to determine several important things, including how much a student already knows about the subject, what their ability to learn is and how they like to learn (these are commonly known as learning styles), and at what level they are at when it comes to fundamentals that may be required, such as English and math skills.

There are several different ways in which you can assess people. This is most commonly done in education by means of a paper or questionnaire the student will complete that will test certain skills and knowledge. From this an overall score can be extrapolated which gives the tutor an idea of where the learner is already at and what their ability to learn might be.

This can also be done however by discussion, most usually in a group. The downside of questioning people in the group environment is that you run the risk of making somebody feel self-conscious, either because what they don’t or feel that they don’t know or because they are uncomfortable speaking in a group (remember that not everybody is an extrovert).

It’s very straightforward to gather useful information from a group of people though, and these are the stages you can go through to do so:

1. 1.

   In a group or roundtable discussion, ask people generally what they understand by terms such as “climate change,” “global warming,” “recycling,” “CO₂ emissions,” “fossil fuels,” “greenhouse gas,” and “renewable energy,” and allow the subject to flesh out into a conversation if time permits as different people will have different levels of understanding, and some people might have never heard specific terms, so the peer group can learn from each other while you use the opportunity to assess the knowledge of each person.

2. 2.

   Ask specific questions of individuals to flesh out the detail of what it is they know and understand. This can be something of a skill you learn with time, as the trick is to ask questions of people at their own level of education and understanding, so as not to overwhelm or intimidate that person, and while also not making it appear to the group that some people are getting asked simpler things than others. A broad range of questions is normally a good way to achieve this.

3. 3.

   A short questionnaire on the subjects that have been discussed can help clarify and consolidate information in people’s minds while also providing you with more accurate, measurable data on what the individuals in the group understand.

4. 4.

   Lastly, either a learning styles questionnaire, sometimes known as VARK (I’ll come to this in a moment), or a discussion about how people find it easiest to learn can help you determine how best to pitch the actual subject matter you’ll cover to the group.

Learning Styles and VARK

There are four recognized learning styles, called VARK . This stands for Visual, Aural, Read-Write, and Kinesthetic. These learning styles represent how people like to learn and how they find leaning to be easy for them:

• Visual learners prefer to watch presentations, videos, or slide decks, and they find that this is a good way for them to absorb information.

• Aural learners like listening to people, or audio descriptions of the subject, and find this is how they best take in the information.

• Read-Write learners prefer to read books, or texts, and then they consolidate what they have learned by rewriting it, usually in note or summary form.

• Kinesthetic learners learn best through activities, such as role-play, group research, or by making or building something to achieve a goal.

The majority of learners are kinesthetic, which is why early years and primary school education largely revolves around play, creativity, and making or building things. Next comes Read-Write, where it is very common for people to consolidate what they have learned by writing notes for themselves, and it is always a good idea to encourage this.

Most learners however will have a combination of all four learning styles. There are plenty of tests you can find online that people can complete, such as this one at https://vark-learn.com. Finding the best way to pitch the subject can really help with education, and a group of employees in an office will probably prefer different ways of learning to a group of PhD students.

Step 2: Observation

Observation takes place during actual teaching, and this is where the benefits of in-person classroom (or in your own case more likely meeting room) teaching really come to the fore. During the pandemic, many if not most of the world’s children were forced to undertake learning over the Internet, that’s the ones that were lucky enough to have a computer and an Internet connection, the rest being forced to either learn from paper-based resources and books provided by their school, or obtained by their parents, or not being able to have any kind of education at all for more than a year and a half.

Perhaps you were a parent of children that had to learn online, or maybe this book has been on the best-seller list now for so many years (wishful thinking; Ed) that you were at school at the time, and part of your education had to take place online.

You might be aware then of the difficulties in remote teaching. It might be trendy to teach over the Internet given all the tools available to us nowadays such as group chat and Microsoft Whiteboard, and I fully accept that it’s a great way to connect students with the most experienced and expert teachers out there, no matter where in the world they may be. Overall though, remote teaching is, in the mind of this particular practitioner, a completely terrible idea if it’s the only way to reach children and not used instead as a supplementary method to enhance a classroom-based experience that already exists.

The reason for this particular little rant is simple. If you teach somebody remotely, or ask them to learn on their own by reading materials, and there is no face-to-face time between the teacher and the student at all, it’s almost impossible to determine if the student is in fact learning anything, if there’s anything they’re having difficulty with, or if they just find the whole subject matter hideously complex to begin with.

Peer-to-Peer

In the world of IT, well I had to bring it back to computers eventually, peer-to-peer is a technological school of thought that uses a distributed network of computers to share resources between one another. It might be most commonly associated with the illegal downloading of movies and television shows, where different parts of the video file exist on a multitude of different Internet-connected computers that themselves pop on and offline periodically, but between them a complete copy of the full video can be constituted.

Peer-to-peer is also used for other purposes however, and you might remember the SETI@home project which was an application people could install on their computers which enabled individuals to donate some of their processing power and time to sift through huge volumes of data collected from observatories around the world, in the hopes of finding a radio or other signal that could indicate the existence of extraterrestrial life. SETI@home used a form of peer-to-peer technology since its first release way back in 1999.

In classrooms peer-to-peer has a different yet not entirely disconnected meaning. We talk about working with and learning from our peers, which is generally defined by the dictionary as being a person who has equal standing with another or others, as in rank, class, or age. When you’re at school, your peers are your classmates and the children in other classes; when you’re at work, your peers are your colleagues; and when you’re out in the big wide world, peers can be used to describe people in a similar social, political, or economic class as yourself.

It is very, very true that we learn from our peers and I have already mentioned in this chapter how roundtable discussion between a class of people can help them impart their own knowledge between one another, with the role of the teacher there purely to time-keep, keep the conversation on track, and provide accuracy and correction when required.

If you are training people within your company or organization, then it is essential that some form of face-to-face teaching is part of the overall program.

Why We Observe

Observation of students comes with many benefits, not the least of which is that the teacher can tell when everybody has bemused looks on their faces, and they realize they’re clearly pitching the subject incorrectly, or that there’s been a genuine mix-up and they’ve just found themselves in the wrong room (it does happen).

As a general rule though, observation of students in a classroom offers the following real-world benefits:

• You can see if anybody is being left out of teaching, either because they don’t understand the subject you’re teaching them, don’t understand the task you have given them, or are in a group activity and are not being included by the other members of that group.

• You can gauge how much people understand about what they’re being taught by wandering around and asking seemingly random questions about the subject (they might seem random to the students, but in fact what you’re doing is something called “checking learning,” or checking that learning is taking place).

• You can encourage peer-to-peer learning; you might, for example, see that one student has finished a task quickly. Checking they have completed it correctly, you can then encourage them to support people who might be struggling and need more help and guidance.

Step 3: Evaluation

The subject of checking learning brings me neatly onto evaluation. Most people in business will think of evaluation as that pointless, waste-of-time form the trainer asks you to fill in at the end of the session so they can get a nice ego-stroking (a little hint on this, if you give people little stars to rate something always make it an even number, then they can’t arbitrarily pick the one in the middle).

Evaluation however is much more than just a check-box, form-filling exercise. It’s what you do to “check that learning has taken place.” There’s no point in teaching a subject for a few hours if half the people in the room will leave none the wiser than when they entered. That helps nobody and will turn people off from education rather than engage them further.

Evaluation then is twofold:

• You’re checking that each person in the room is able to take something valuable away from the lesson, that they have understood at least the main thrust of what you were teaching them (remember not everybody learns at the same level or at the same pace), and that they know what to look for and where to look if they want to learn more.

• You’re learning as a practitioner what worked, what didn’t work as well, and what you can improve for next time. You might, for example, find that one particular thread of the subject hasn’t been understood by the class. This is fine and nothing to be ashamed of, as teachers are also constantly learning and improving their craft.

You can evaluate people in different ways, all of which are good, but the one(s) you choose will be those that best fit your scenario, the group, the context of the training, or time you have available:

• You could go down the academic route and ask people to fill in a quiz, perhaps a multichoice questionnaire (though people will guess and you’ll get less accurate results) on the subject that you taught them.

• You can go around the room and ask everybody one or two questions about what’s been taught. You need to remember that this works hand in hand with assessment and observation so that you only ask people questions appropriate to their own level of learning, but it can be a good way to consolidate the subject in the minds of the group.

• You can do it as part of observation by asking people to make notes on the subject you are teaching them, and then while they’re engaged on a task wander around the room and take a sneaky look at all their notes. While not everybody will read their notes afterward, note-taking is a good way to help people to comprehend and clarify the subject in their own minds.

When it comes to the summary, there are additional things you can do, such as encouraging water-cooler discussions between the students later, if they all work in the same place, or to perhaps suggest they set up a best practice noticeboard on which they can post notes of suggestions they might have or have been told for helping the environment.

This latter method has additional benefits, as it will also reach people in the workplace that didn’t attend the training and hopefully encourage and provoke additional conversations between the students and the wider workforce.

Never Use the Word “Understand”

One thing I really can’t emphasize enough though is never ever to use the word “understand” when describing students. They can use the word, but you’re simply not allowed to do so. The reason for this is that “understand” is an unquantifiable thingumybob, nobody can really pin down what it means, as one person’s understanding of a subject will likely be at great variance from another person’s understanding.

There are other terms you can use however that are every bit as good and that in this context mean the same thing anyway. Can the students “Demonstrate” something, i.e., can they show, through words or actions, something they have been taught, is a very good alternative as it is something quantifiable, whereas understanding is not a quantifiable metric.

Another term you can use is “Identify” as in, can the students identify something that contributes to climate change? This, again, is something quantifiable and demonstrable.

While it’s all well and good to teach your workforce about what you’re doing, why it’s important, and what they themselves can do about it, you might not have the knowledge in-house to establish and run training courses. Indeed, you’re reading this book so the assumption I make can be that you’re starting out on your journey and are still gathering information on what you can do and why it’s important.

In this case, you want to bring your workforce with you by inspiring them with your actions and deeds. Here, rather than it being the content you’re focusing on, instead your communication is king (alas there aren’t enough appropriate words that begin or rhyme with the letter Q). When you decide on a new future for the company, perhaps a new product line, new marketing strategy, or a change of direction for the business, you’ll have a series of planning meetings between the senior management and related stakeholders and employees. The outcome of these meetings will be a plan is devised and written up so that everybody involved is clear what is going to happen, when, and why.

The difference between a business plan and an environmental plan is that you wouldn’t necessarily convey the former to your workforce. This could be because the information is sensitive and you don’t want your competitors getting wind of what you’re planning, just in case they steal the march on you.

When it comes to your environmental strategy though, this wouldn’t matter, if anything you want your competitors to do the same thing at least. Sure, if you adopt the right climate strategies, then you can use the public relations benefits that come with it to build the business and to get ahead of your competitors; you are in business after all.

If they do get wind of what you’re doing though, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as word will get out about what you’re doing, and all publicity as the saying goes is good publicity.

So it is with your workforce, you want them to know what it is you’re doing but crucially, and this brings me back to the first point I made in this chapter, why you are doing it.

Make the Workforce Part of the Solution

This is the point at which you want to bring the workforce with you and make them part of the solution. Just in the way that global climate change can’t be tackled without every person and every business and organization doing something to help, it also can’t be solved by your business itself unless every member of the workforce plays their part in what you do.

So what does this mean? Well what it certainly doesn’t mean is union-style meetings where employee representatives sit in with senior management and chew the fat over the subject matter at hand. It’s all the workforce you need to bring with you, and each and every one of them needs to play their part. If you go down the employee representation route, people will end up being told what they must do, instead of what you really need, which is choosing to do so themselves.

Now let’s tackle the elephant in the room here. Not every employee will want to get on board with your plans. Some will be skeptical, some will not see the relevance to them, some might be outright climate deniers. These people might accept that the climate is changing, but feel that it’s a natural process rather than something humanity has caused.

To these people I would say this. That belief is fine; we’re not going to shame or dismiss somebody for having a belief. It is true though that humanity can do something about it, and this is how these people can be encouraged to get on board.

So we come to communication, planning, and inclusion. Take the time to explain to your workforce what you plan to do, but be prepared to listen to them in return. They might, you never know, have ideas that you hadn’t considered that could be very helpful and effective or perhaps even expand your plans further. Don’t dismiss the dumb ideas, as that will only discourage people from helping; find a way to make everybody feel involved and valued.

As part of your plans, there will be things that individuals can themselves do. This could be a small thing such as unplugging their phone or laptop charger when they’re not using it, as I spoke about in Chapter 2, turning off their PC monitor when they’re not using that, or encouraging their own teams to meet others virtually rather than in person.

Keep Everybody Involved

There can be a temptation within business to set teams against one another, so that they compete to be the most productive, to generate the biggest revenue, and to reduce costs. With your climate program, you need every single person and every single team on the same page. It might then be tempting to encourage teams to compete against one another to see who can become the most climate friendly.

This can have downsides however. Remember you are trying to bring everybody on board, and that means that everybody is equally valuable and one team is not, and can never be, better or more valuable than any other. No person is more equal than any other person.

So whatever it is you decide to do, find a way to keep everybody involved. Earlier in this chapter, I said you could have a suggestions board on which people could pin their top sustainability tips, things they know themselves or have heard or read about from others. You might want to encourage people to submit articles they’ve read online or stories from themselves or others that can be compiled into an email newsletter or a section on the company intranet that they can all read. You never know, you might learn something yourself that you didn’t know.

Inspiring the Workforce

It’s through this inclusion and making everybody in the business or organization feel valuable and involved that you can inspire the workforce. Let’s take one possible scenario. The project starts small with teams deciding what they can do with their own small part of the business to reduce their impact on the environment.

You might have one department look at the amount of printer paper they’re using and decide that much of it can be done by saving files as PDFs instead that are sent to people by email or Teams. Another team might also look at the volume they print but, deciding that it really is necessary to print in large volumes, source more sustainable paper instead and switch to a bamboo supplier. They could also decide that everything should be printed in monochrome and at draft quality to save on toner.

Another team comes to you and asks for recycling bins to be fitted around the company – not just general recycling, but separating all the different types of product that can be recycled. You contact your local waste management company, and they tell you they indeed take food scraps, glass, and even items employees bring in from home such as unwanted clothing and small electronic items for recycling. Around your premises then you can install recycling for paper, metal, plastic, glass, and food scraps, with the waste management company adding additional recycling facilities on-site or nearby in cooperation with your local town or city council.

Another team within the business decides that, as everybody in the business works regular hours, they can start to car share. This brings unexpected benefits as journey times are reduced and the fuel costs for employees come down when they’re then allowed to use the carpool lanes. Rotas are devised to help facilitate journeys into work and back.

Then the facilities management department come up with a great idea. They’d been planning an upgrade to the office for some time and had already spoken with contractors about the feasibility of installing equipment like inverters, which I spoke about in Chapter 2. They’ve been looking around the office at the equipment they’ll be replacing, which is most of the desks, tables, and chairs. There’s a lot there and so they’ve contacted the city council, who have in turn put them in touch with some local community groups.

Several of these groups have quite literally bitten their arm off for a few tables and chairs, and more have asked for desks. The facilities manager reckons that 60% of the furniture that’s being replaced can go to a good home locally, and they’ve begun looking around the business at other things that will be replaced during the refit.

Getting the Ball Rolling

Each department is invited to share their best practice stories and ideas with the rest of the business, and this gives each department ideas in turn. Some will also roll out the same plans as others; the business as a whole might encourage a company-wide carpool scheme so as to get the best effect from it or ask the local transportation company if they’d consider placing a bus or a tram stop nearby, so that employees who normally drive to work every day can instead be encouraged to take public transport.

Each employee begins to get in on the project, not because they’re forced to, but because they can start to see small steps building into a greater whole. They begin to tell their friends, family, and colleagues from suppliers and customers what you’re all doing, and the ball starts rolling.

It doesn’t take long before people in the local community and even further afield are beginning to hear about what it is your business is doing, and the marketing department decides to issue a press release, and set aside a place on the company website where all of your environmental plans can be promoted.

I have suggested a little while ago one way in which your business or organization can work with your local community to help tackle climate change and reduce waste. This type of thing is actually fairly common and has been for years, but not every business adopts it and premises refits can all too frequently come with large skips outside the building filled with a combination of furniture, carpet, computers, and appliances.

You have several ways into the local community and community and charitable groups. The first is through the town or city council if they have coordinators that provide support to these external voluntary groups. You can also contact your local paper and ask if they will write a story about what it is you’re doing and what it is you can offer to the local community if anything is going spare.

Contacting local sports clubs and teams is also a great way to reach the community, and they might place posters and information around their stadium or club premises for a while telling people how they can contact you.

The most important though are the people already working for your company. If you let these people know what you can do for the community, what you have available, and how you want to work more widely with them, then you will quickly find that your employees are heavily involved in everything from childcare centers to sports venues, to the local book club. Word will quickly spread about your work, and you can designate a department or person within the business for them to contact.

It’s not just about giving away the furniture and technology you no longer need either. You may decide there are other ways to contribute to the community and where they can help you in return. This could involve donating excess food and drink from the company canteen to a local food bank, working with a local community or pressure group to push for better public transport links, offering your car park one Sunday a month for a car boot sale where people can resell things they might otherwise be tempted to simply throw away (one person’s garbage is another person’s treasure after all), or to just help get the message about your environmental shake-up out into the community by sponsoring a floral display on a city roundabout.

In turn, you might then find local community organizations that can do things for you in turn. Perhaps a group sells and delivers locally grown organic fruits and vegetables, and you can place a regular order for your staff canteen and kitchens.

Locally Sourced

Maybe there are other local businesses that can supply products to your business. You are already a part of your local community simply by virtue of being there, and you’re plugged into the best resource you can possibly hope for, for information about that community and what they do and can provide. This information source is, of course, yourself and your workforce.

In exactly the same way as I mentioned, you should have a single point of contact within your company for external groups and organizations to use; that single point of contact can also be the person that people within your company can go to with ideas and suggestions of who in the local or the wider community might be good for you to contact.

Take my own example. I live in the middle of a huge farming community. There’s everything grown here from wheat to vegetables, and there’s also a large amount of cattle and sheep farming. Now I know we should be reducing cattle farming as it’s bad for the environment in many ways, from the cow fart of death polluting the atmosphere and destroying the ozone layer to the welfare of the animals. Without getting into a protracted debate on the benefits of vegetarianism and veganism, for as long as people are consuming meat, is it not better for the environment to have that meat come from a local source?

Where do you purchase your food, fruits, and vegetables? I’m willing to bet it’ll be from the local supermarket. These businesses offer choice, convenience, and variety. They’re open up to 24 hours a day, have absolutely everything you need under one roof, and therefore what’s not to like?

We need to ask ourselves where all these products are coming from? Sure, certain fruits and vegetables are seasonal, and out of season will come from around the world where they’re still being grown at that time of year. As for the rest of it though, we’re looking at products shipped around the country and around the world in massive trucks and shipping containers.

These use huge volumes of oil to fuel them, fossil fuels that we’re supposed to be using much less of. It makes sense then to take a little more time over your shopping as you could find that the local butcher and fruit and vegetable store sell locally sourced products. In addition to not using huge volumes of oil to ship them around, they’ll likely be much fresher and tastier than the supermarket stocked equivalents.

Local markets and especially farmers markets are great sources of environmentally sustainable foodstuffs too if you have them in your area. There are additional benefits to shopping at smaller, independent businesses too. Now I hate memes (those pictures with pithy messages we see all the time on social media), but recently one caught my eye.

In line, the cashier tells an elderly woman:

- Madam, you should bring your own shopping bags because these plastic bags are not eco-friendly!

The elderly lady apologized and replied:

- In my day there was no such green wave.

- That’s our problem today, ma’am. Your generation did not care enough about the environment.

- You’re right – the elderly lady replied. Our generation did not care for the environment adequately. Back in the shop, glass bottles of milk, carbonated drinks, and beer were returned. The shop was taking them back to the factory where they were washed and sterilized before they used them again and again. We really didn’t care about the environment in our time. Even the baby diapers were washed because there were no disposable ones. We dried them ourselves, not in electric dryers. These diapers were dried outdoors using wind and solar energy.

In our time, we really weren’t worried about the environmental status. We only had one TV and one radio at home, not one TV for each room. And the TV had a 14 inch screen, not the size of a stadium, which when it broke down will be thrown away unknown where. In the kitchen we had to do everything with our hands because there were no electrical appliances to do everything for us. When we sent something fragile in the mail to pack it, we used old newspapers, not plastic bubbles and Styrofoam balls that took 500 years to degrade.

We didn’t use gasoline mowers to mow the grass in our time, they were mechanical, and we used our muscles to get them moving. Exercises were amazing and we didn’t have to go to the gym to keep fit.

You’re right, we weren’t worried about the environment at our time. We drank water straight from the tap, not from platinum bottles and cups that are now filling the oceans.

In fact, there was no green wave in our time – then we all got on the tram or bus, the boys used bikes or walked to go to school instead of using their parents as a 24 hour taxi service.

So, isn’t it amazing that the current generation talks so much about the “environment” but doesn’t want to give up anything and doesn’t think about living a little more like we did in my day?

There are then, very clearly, benefits to shopping locally and you never know what you might find. It’s definitely worth a look as if you can procure at least some of the products and services you need from local suppliers, that in itself will do wonders for helping you achieve your sustainability goals.

Plastics and Packaging

I want to wrap this chapter up though with a discussion about packaging . I am making a very conscious effort to reduce the amount of packaging I use from the products I purchase. Getting my fruits and vegetables from the local farmers markets goes some way toward this, but I was pretty appalled recently when I bought some filled pasta from the supermarket for lunch, only to find that within its plastic bag was another plastic bag containing the food.

If we look at how recyclable different products are, then plastics definitely come at the bottom of the list. Plastics can only be recycled a few times before they’re of such low quality they have to go to landfill, or they end up killing wildlife in the planet’s oceans.

Paper and cardboard is slightly better, but they too can only be recycled a few times before they have to be burned or destroyed. By far, the two best materials you can use for packaging are metal and glass, both of which can be recycled ad infinitum. I have changed my own purchasing habits now to reflect this, using paper bags for fruits and vegetables rather than plastic ones, and purchasing foodstuffs such as pasta in cardboard boxes rather than the ones sold in plastic wrapping.

Additionally, I have completely stopped buying wine by the box (convenient if I only wanted one or two glasses a night) in favor of buying it by the bottle, because these are made of glass. Soups and other products I’ll buy in metal tins rather than plastic tubs, and so on.

All of this is much easier when buying products on a local level because it’s the big manufacturers and supermarkets that are the primary users of plastic, and this is because they need to keep things fresh for longer as they are shipped much further and for far longer than locally sold products.

This might also be something to consider if your own company manufactures goods. Can you use a cardboard wrapping instead of plastic, for example?

Your local environmental policies can only be a win-win. You’ll inspire the people that work for you, they’ll tell their friends and families, you’ll get more goodwill from the local community, and in return you’ll become a more desirable company to work for.

That goodwill will stretch outward to your suppliers, stakeholders, and customers, be they local, national, or global, and you’ll inspire them as they’ll look at what you’re doing and look to see if they can do something similar themselves, as will your employees and their families and friends.

You don’t have to do these things on your own, but starting that way can really get the ball rolling. Before you know it, a small idea from the accounts team in their own office has become something that other people and businesses have adopted… from little acorns and all that!

We’ll take this to the next logical step then, and in the next chapter we’ll look at how this rolls out nationally and globally and how everything really is connected to everything else.