Energy Saving Week: Ashden winners tackle energy-saving in businesses

It's Energy Saving Week, and we're highlighting how Ashden winners are saving energy. Yesterday we looked at community-based initiatives, today it's energy-saving in businesses.

Ashden winners have been helping businesses to save millions and cut carbon emissions. ENWORKS in the North West has worked with over 10,000 companies since 2002. By helping businesses to use its online resource efficiency toolkit, it can show how new installations, changes in manufacturing processes, or behaviour changes, can impact on carbon emissions and competitiveness. ENWORKS is currently helping businesses with annual cost savings of £117 million and savings of 855,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.

Global Action Plan (GAP) encourages behaviour change within the workplace by enabling businesses to develop their own energy-savvy teams called ‘Environment Champions’. Usually, around 20 staff work with GAP to understand where and how energy is used within the company, before creating a plan for tackling it.

We especially like the energy bike which GAP loans to companies for awareness-raising events (pic). You get to feel - through the burn in your thighs - just how much energy it takes to light a bulb, run a laptop or play an ipod. GAP has worked with over 70 companies and trained 1,200 people, influencing 86,000 staff and saving around 9,300 CO2 tonnes a year.

You can find out about the energy saving work of all of our Award winners from our website. Tomorrow we'll be hearing from members of the Ashden team who are saving energy by refurbishing their homes.

More on Energy Saving Week
Obama says energy efficiency will get US "quarter of the way"
Ashden winners tackle energy saving in the community
This week is Energy Saving Week

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Coverage of our event at Intelligence Squared

Treehugger.com has reported on the Intelligence Squared event we were involved with on 25th January:

"Can Asia go green? (and if it doesn't has the world had it?)" was a fascinating discussion amongst four women (finally!) from Asian countries. Malini Mehra, from India, Christine Loh, from Hong Kong (a Time magazine Hero of the Environment), Svati Bhogle, Indian and winner of an Ashden Award for Sustainability and Isabel Hilton, editor of China Dialogue each examined their respective country's status and future.

Svati, pictured below with Ben Dixon of the Ashden Awards, won the Energy Champion award in 2008 for her work with wood stoves for businesses in India.
We had several displays set up for the event, including scale models of some of the technology used by our international winners:and the infamous "energy bike" from Global Action Plan (a 2008 UK winner):

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