Working sustainably is all about making the most efficient use of natural resources, and producing the least amount of waste and pollution possible.

But before you can look for ways of improving efficiency, you need to have some idea of your current resource usage.

This gives you a benchmark to compare any improvements against.

It also allows you to see how much you are saving, and which production methods work best and are the most economical.

It's not always easy to measure all the resources you use, especially when some of them aren't directly visible.

For example, electricity consumption is hard to quantify unless you can put a power meter on every electrical item used in the job.

Usage levels are also hard to pin down if only a small proportion of a resource is used in the manufacture of one item - such as water for cooling or cutters for plaining.

However, there are still ways of measuring the usage of various resources, so that you can make comparisons between the quantities being consumed over time.

Resource usage measurements for a chest of drawers

Let's see how we could quantify the materials and energy supplies that go into making the solid timber chest of drawers we looked at in the last lesson (Making a product). Select the links below to see the list of resources we've identified for this item, together with their units of measurement and typical quantities used.

For the sake of the exercise, we won't look at the details of the Non-process energy usage.

However, at a management level, these forms of energy consumption are generally examined in close detail, because they can have a significant effect on the overall running costs of the company.

We will look at practical ways of reducing energy consumption in more detail in Section 3: Improving efficiency