UK: Salford – November 2024: Researchers from the University of Salford have now designed a business for SMEs to create a sustainability calculator for reducing the expenditure of small businesses in measuring and managing carbon emissions. Set for roll out later this month, the tool has been specifically designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that do not have the resources available to conventional initiatives on sustainability. The aim is for both business growth and local economic development through sustainable practices.
Calculated solution for SME sustainability
Business School at the University of Salford has now come up with a new calculator that will enable the assessment of environmental impacts of the small businesses regarding their activities in several dimensions of business: electricity used, and how it is distributed to product; financial activities; and the traveling of employees. Using such a tool, users will be able to monitor the change in carbon emissions over time, which enables them to understand where they are able to make reductions with more-targeted shots at increasing their overall lower carbon footprint.
The tool aims at serving as a low-cost, maintenance solution for SMEs with limited budgets for sustainability initiatives. Since this scheme is free of charge to businesses that are affiliated with the Centre for Sustainable Innovation and the Salford Business School, it reduces the ‘barriers to entry’ for these small and medium-sized firms going about focusing on sustainability.
Benchmarking and Performance Comparison
Beside the emission tracking tool, it offers its users benchmarking. The businesses now have a chance to compare performance against industry standards, government targets, and peers’ achievements. This layer of insight is meant to enable business to identify its progress compared to those peers, thereby making it easier to establish realistic and achievable sustainability goals.
Benchmarking can be a very good motivator, at least for small enterprises, as the SME will set targets based on how best others are performing in their field or region. Business establishments also keep improving the changes and optimizations that they make on emissions data over time to promote continued sustainability efforts.
Focus Areas: Energy, Distribution, Finance, and Travel
Four areas where the calculator concentrates on key aspects of which businesses tend to be the biggest polluters include:
Usage of Electricity: The calculator captures energy consumption in which businesses can find ways and means of reducing usage, renewable sources, or even the usage of energy efficiency solutions.
Product Distribution: Smaller businesses that use logistics and a distribution requirement will also be able to have an assessment through the calculator when it comes to emissions from shipping the product, warehousing, and transportation.
Financial Activities: The tool also focuses on the environmental impact of all financial activities. For example, any investment and procurement decisions that are taken by businesses can be considered for giving an all-round view of the operations.
Employee Travel: Any commuting by the employee and business travel are considered to track the carbon cost involved in work-related transport. All of them can now help small businesses identify a few areas for improvement and make sustainability goals more accessible.
Accessible Innovation for Small Business Growth
In Salford’s Business School, they largely take after the needs of SMEs. Most are eager to embrace sustainability, but largely due to low budget provisions. The newly developed sustainability calculator by the school fights this with an accessible tool that is free and operated according to the capacity of SMEs.
In this sense, sustainability can increasingly be considered integral to business resilience and durability. For small businesses that adopt the concept of sustainability, the potential benefits include savings in costs due to improved efficiency, enhancing brand reputation, and also justification of conformity with regulatory and consumer demands for responsible environmentally conscious business practices.
Academic Collaboration and Local Impact
It’s at the University of Salford, one of the UK’s forerunners in its pursuit of making sustainability a reality for small business. Association with the Centre for Sustainable Innovation provides access to a calculator but also to expertise, access to resources, and education which supports the environmental ambitions of SMEs more widely.
According to Salford’s researchers, business can also contribute towards community sustainability. They all agree that a sustainability culture in any business offers opportunities to seek efficient carbon reduction efforts, among other contributions toward the mitigation of broader climatic change challenges.
Free Access and Easy Onboarding
It will be free for businesses affiliated with Salford’s Centre for Sustainable Innovation and Business School and can be expanded as need dictates. This model is aligned with the sensibilities of limited-budget enterprises or resource-constrained companies, especially those without adequate resources to implement specifically dedicated environmental solutions.
In line with its provision of onboarding resources for businesses, Salford University will ensure that SMEs can begin using the tool with minimal setup. Its support is aimed at encouraging engagement with the tool and getting small businesses to focus more on sustainable growth-even if they are newcomers to environmental metrics.
Challenges Ahead
With the emphasis placed on being sustainable by smaller businesses in the UK, the carbon calculator at Salford provides them with a realistic route to making changes that are palpable. In fact, SMEs have just begun with sustainability-and where they can use such a tool, they can actually start to track data, set goals, and change gradually without having to incur significant costs to get underway.
Combined with the UK’s carbon reduction targets and a plan to build a greener economy, tools such as the Salford calculator will most certainly be helpful in going a long way towards realizing such goals. Helping businesses measure and manage their environmental impacts, Salford University is contributing to larger national and international sustainability goals, supporting growth that “does not compromise environmental integrity.”.
Launching sustainability calculator at the end of this month, this would serve to benefit not just local businesses or the university community but, more important, the overall movements being taken in the UK toward a greener economy. Placing the focus on sustainability affordability and accessibility as a goal, Salford University puts itself in a position that makes it a critical ally to SMEs that look to balance economic success with environmental responsibility.
Sources: University of Salford