Businesses offered help to improve sustainability of travel operations

The Energy Saving Trust (EST) is joining forces with Enterprise Rent-A-Car to help businesses analyse how they use vehicles and identify ways to increase fuel efficiency.

Backed by the Department for Transport (DfT), the partnership’s focus will be to identify viable alternatives to the use of unregulated private vehicles for business use, known as ‘grey fleets’, introduce programmes that foster behavioural change and look at how alternatives vehicles, such as electric vehicles, can be incorporated.

Analysing Woking Borough Council’s fleet, the EST found that due to better journey planning and more consideration over whether trips are actually necessary, the Council has saved thousands of pounds with no reduction in its services to the local community.

Its review showed that the CO2 footprint for employee business travel dropped by 37% (around 1.2 tonnes of CO2 per year) and grey fleet mileage fell by 14,000 miles a year, around 25%.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s director of business rental, Adrian Bewley, said: “Businesses need to travel in order to achieve their goals, but they know that this has an impact on their sustainability”.

He added that the challenge for companies was in finding the right information to help them improve their travel operations.

Leigh Stringer