Reducing Carbon Emissions, Improving The Bottom Line - Queensland complete printing

Queensland Complete Printing Services is based in Nambour on the Sunshine Coast. It's a small medium printer with twelve staff and we've been going since 1983. We see climate change as an opportunity as a small business to create a competitive difference with us in the market place. We wanted to offer our clients the opportunity to have carbon neutral printing in the future and so we've been working towards climate change carbon neutral status for now three years. Our lessons came initially from the EcoBiz program and the Sunshine Coast Regional Council have a facilitator with the EcoBiz program and they were the ways we began our journey, since then we've used other government websites, ecoefficiency is another website that is very helpful. These days with the net the information is out there it's really about the will not the information. We got a 9.5% power reduction just by turning things off. We then implemented lots of recycling strategies and we're down to point eight of a wheelie bin a week of waste and landfill and we're wondering what's in that point eight. Our strategies to reduce greenhouse gases are around reducing our energy, water and waste costs. We harvest all of our production water off of our own roof so that that side of our water use is taken care of by harvesting rainwater and through our environmental management system we know that we use about 21 litres per person per day for kitchens and toilets. One of the great things about this place is the relationship of the staff and the commitment of the staff to our projects, big business can always put in the high tech solution, they can always put in the machine, the computer the monitor. In relation to small business it's about behaviour change, it's about doing things differently and having everyone in the place do that. The fact that we can sell our paper is because every time the staff go to a bin they put the right stuff in the right bin so it's micro-decisions that add up to being what we are today. My first advice is to just get started, begin the journey and you can begin that journey with some simple system like the EcoBiz program which is very basic, you assess where you are now, you do a baseline assessment, a site survey - what are the opportunities within your workplace? Then a simple action plan and then just get going.