Resource Efficiency Review Tool
East of England Development Agency
Developed a Regional Environmental Review Tool (RERT) which enables the review of environmental impacts, resource use, and comparison against benchmarks, indicating areas for improvement and generating suggested action plans.
The RERT project was designed to provide an on-line self help tool for use by SMEs in the East of England region, as part of the Resource Efficiency East (REE) Programme, to achieve a measurable improvement in the environmental performance of regional SMEs, (and a corresponding reduction in their environmental impact), while improving business efficiency and long-term competiveness. The RERT accomplishes this by providing SMEs with the knowledge, information and guidance they need to start to understand and address their own environmental and resource efficiency issues, many of which they may be currently unaware of.
Time is the one resource that is constantly in short supply to managers of small and medium sized companies; while it is important that those managers undergo awareness-raising in environmental and resource efficiency issues, along with the potential benefits of implementing environmental and resource efficiency improvements, it is equally important that this should be done in a time-efficient manner - hence the provision of our self-help tool.
The RERT provides a review of the key resources of energy, water, waste, materials and transport used within a business and provides an action plan based on comparisons with industry sectors and best practice standards. The output report is used by REE to identify needs within the company and provide additional specialist support where appropriate.
Structure and outline content of the tool
The RERT is primarily aimed at businesses in the East of England region. The self-help tool was developed as an on-line application, accessible and freely available to anyone with internet access.
The user interface is designed to be highly intuitive with maximum ease of use, scripted to present clients with a simple questionnaire appropriate to that business sector and record the user responses. Most questions provide the user with multiple options to select from, minimising data entry errors and allowing completion of the entire process in less than 20 minutes.
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