42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

With five offices and 141 partners, law firm Hill Dickinson is not what you might call a hippy dippy enterprise. It doesn't strike radical poses, it's not a charity and it doesn't do ‘whimsical.'

It does, however, take pains to offset every gram of the carbon it generates in the course of its business. With the help of carbon offset firm co2balance, it has undertaken to plant 1,149 deciduous trees a year in a wood outside Carlisle to offset its weighty carbon footprint of 1034 tonnes a year.

Its motives are a mixture of self-interest and social conscience but the bottom line is that it's about survival. It's a strategic planning issue, explains operations director Keith Feeny.

"We've been around as a firm for 200 years and we would like to be around for another 200. We certainly want to be around long enough for the people who are now office juniors to become senior partners. If the worst forecasts for global warming come true, that may not be the case."

While it's true that the firm is not going to affect global warming much on its own, there are other concrete short term benefits in becoming a carbon neutral company.

The greatest is that having a clear environmental policy is rapidly becoming a ‘hygiene factor', a minimum requirement to stay in business. "I can't think of one tender for contracts with prospective clients in local government and public services we've done recently that didn't include significant questions on our carbon emissions," says Feeny.

It also allows Hill Dickinson to contribute to the communities it works with. "It fits very well with our corporate responsibility programme. We pride ourselves on being part of the fabric of the communities we serve and we believe in active and progressive corporate citizenship," says Feeny.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about going carbon neutral is just how easy and inexpensive it was. It took little more than a phone call. "I was expecting it to be a major headache and seriously expensive. But all we had to do was calculate our footprint or energy consumption, they do the rest," he says.

"It was slightly tricky calculating our carbon outputs," he adds, "but they helped us, so it only took a few hours." Typically for a service company, half the company's carbon emissions come from its electricity use and most of the balance from travel.

And the cost? Well, as they say, a principle isn't a principle until it costs you, so Feeny was steeling himself to fork out as much as £80,000 a year. But the cost was nothing like that. "The charge is around ten pounds a tree. So even for a relatively large company like ours, the annual cost comes to about £10,000 – peanuts."

If he does have a criticism, it is that carbon offset is calculated only on his firm's direct activities. "It does not address our supply chain," says Feeny. "But it is not the end of our environmental ambitions, it is simply the beginning. We are looking at going for BS14001, the environmental standard, and we want to reduce our emissions to the lowest possible level."

Overall, he says, carbon offsetting really is a no-brainer. "There are no down sides that I can see. It's easy, surprisingly cheap, it makes us feel good and look good and it has motivated us to go further. There really is no excuse for other firms not to do the same."