Four campaigns, four challenges
Aim
DP Architects set out to reduce their energy and waste consumption, while increasing staff health and wellbeing.
The Challenge
Energy: appliances left on after work / when not in use
Health & Wellbeing: staff had a paper piling culture which led to dust accumulation
Waste - reduce: the organisation needed to build the infrastructure to reduce the need for hard copies of documents
Waste - reuse: as architects, staff use a lot of (single sided) paper and also sketchbooks.
Skills Developed
- Raising awareness through education is important to the success of the campaign
- Aligning with the timeline of other workplace activities and piggybacking on them for a more complete delivery of the campaign
- Acquire and analyse data for reporting (to raise awareness and for measuring success)
Impact in Numbers
125
Staff Reached
77,000kg CO2 saved (projected annual)
CO2e Saved
125
Staff Trained
"The campaign material is a real eye opener. It is shocking to know how big DP's environmental impact is. So shocking that it encourages change."
The Solution
- The findings from the measurements of energy were reported to all staff through the use of EDMs and info-videos to create awareness of the amount of emissions staff contribute each day.
- Motivating the staff to tidy their workstations was timed with the Chinese New Year spring cleaning period.
- Awareness was raised using data on the impact of the organisation in terms of paper use.
- To facilitate softcopy work, a software was rolled out to encourage soft copies over hard copies.
- Notebook creation booths were created, with signs and flyers to let staff know where the booths were. At each booth, simple instructions were also given to tackle the barrier of not knowing how to use the booths. For staff who did not collect enough paper themselves, single-sided print collection points were also set-up to collect single-sided prints from all staff.
Key Insights
- Assemble a strong and passionate team
- Need for some incentives to motivate people to change
- Timing of the campaign is critical, choose a period of minimal disruption to work practices
- Running the campaign for a longer duration would yield better results.
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