Clean Energy Future

My name is Tony McManus I work for PRD Nationwide in Geelong. I work in sales and management of a real estate agent.

I think we have taken a fairly conservative approach to how we go about being green. A lot of the initiatives are fairly simple ones. We are conscious of the power consumption with our air conditioning and just by adjusting the temperature levels by a couple of degrees can have a have a significant saving. Automatic timers of light switches, a big saving for us was better use of our photocopier.

Woman uses photocopier in office.

What we did was choose double sided printing instead of single sided printing. And we estimated that we saved about five reams of paper per month, it’s not just the paper we were saving it’s the energy we were saving, halving the printing load. So that became something like a 30 per cent saving on our machine.

I think what really helped us achieve some great results was the establishment of our green team, and they wandered around the office and identified a whole lot of little things that could be done. By getting them engaged, it’s surprising how small measures add up to savings when they are aggregated.

Woman walks around office turning off lights as she leaves the room.

Obviously there are some savings to achieve by lowering our energy consumption, and um, I think it also works as a spin off from a marketing perspective. People identify our company as a company that does care about the environment.

So apart from a direct cost saving that you can achieve, which flows through to the bottom line, the direct and tangible benefits are a better staff environment.

Pans office cubicles where people are working at desks with phones and computers.

But it’s probably one of those benefits that we won’t see up front, but once you are doing it they should flow through.