To access most of the resources on Green Street, you need to join and choose a membership package, which affects which resources you can use. Household membership is free and business subscriptions are based on organisation size (see pricing).

Set up your profile

If you’ve already joined, sign in and go to your profile (see the ‘My profile‘ link).

Review your profile info – add or edit your profile image, check contact info and adjust your privacy settings. If you’re signed in as a business, you can edit tags and profile text.

Start by finding out how sustainable you are already, and calculate your emissions.

Do your Green Street Score

From the shortcuts menu, select ‘Review my score & pledges‘. This will take you to the Green Street Score, which calculates your greenhouse gas emissions by asking a few simple questions. After you answer them, you’ll see a score for your household or business. The score rates you as a low, moderate or high contributor.

Don’t worry if the Green Street Score says you are a high contributor – that simply means there’s plenty of room to improve sustainability. Having a go is the main thing.

Review your score regularly

Look for ways to reduce your score by reviewing the questions to see how you could answer differently in future. You can go back and review your score as often as you like. We recommend doing it every month if you can.

After you do your Green Street Score, the system identifies areas you could focus on to become more sustainable. It highlights some of them and shows anticipated emission reductions.

Make pledges

Look through the strategies suggested and pledge to address up to five of them. This will help you set achievable goals, instead of trying to tackle everything all at once.

We encourage you to select only those you plan to act on in the next few months. To do this, tick the boxes beside your chosen actions. These will be saved to your account page as ‘pledges’ for you to look back on.

Generate a personalised certificate

If you want to, you can print your pledges onto a personalised certificate and pin it up as a reminder for your household or workplace. To do that, click the ‘My certificate’ link from your profile page.

Now that you’ve pledged to take action, you need strategies to achieve your goals. A simple way to get started on this is to earn Green Street Badges. As well as rewarding achievements, the badges act as a guide to simple strategies.

About Green Street Badges

The badges are divided into household and workplace badges. Choose the relevant category and review the badges. For each badge, you’ll see a list of specific actions you need to do to earn the badge. You may already qualify for some of the badges if you’ve previously been taking action to be more sustainable.

If you’d like a printable list of all badges to review at leisure or a matrix mapping badges to UN Sustainable Development Goals, sign in and download those files from the Badges Resource Page.

Choose badges to aim for

Start by picking one or two badges to work towards. Make these areas you identified via your Green Street Score and pledges. For example, if your goal as a household is to recycle more, head to the Household Recycle Badge and aim to complete at least four of the strategies listed. You don’t have to do them all at once – you can spread your efforts over weeks or months.

Display badges you’ve earned

Once you’ve achieved the strategies to earn a badge, you can display it on your profile.

To do that, sign in and go to your member profile page, then select ‘Review my badges’. Follow the ‘Read more’ links to check the actions for each badge, and tick checkboxes for the badge/s you have earned. Once you’ve clicked the ‘save’ button, the selected badges will display on your profile.

Note: the badges are self-regulated and rely on your honest declaration on behalf of your household or business. However, badges for businesses may be randomly audited to ensure you’re on track to achieve goals.

See the video for guidance

How to use and display Green Street Badges

Follow Green Tips to implement simple strategies and cut carbon

To get help on how to implement your chosen strategies and earn badges, see Green Tips. These are simple, common-sense pointers on ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Each tip indicates the amount of carbon you could save and links to useful websites and resources.

For example, if you want to work towards the energy badge (workplace), see the Green Tip on energy efficiency. It says you could save up to 1 tonne of carbon per year by purchasing energy-efficient appliances and office equipment. The tip includes links to energy calculators and other info. See also Green Tips on hot water systems, green power and building design.

Find inspiration and keep up with sustainability issues

We can’t all be sustainability experts, but staying on top of the latest thinking can inspire action. Visit Green Street’s Inspiration section to keep up with key sustainability issues, regulations, strategies, technologies and tools.

See practical examples of sustainability success stories and innovations. Get insights into important issues relevant to your industry, such as sustainable design, responsible purchasing, advanced technologies, and human rights. All inspiration posts include carefully curated links to related resources or websites where you can learn more.

Even when you’ve set a few priorities and found some info to help you get started, it’s hard to make progress and stay motivated without some sort of action plan.

Simple planning for households

As a household, your sustainability plan may be as simple as a checklist of actions for the Green Street Badges you want to achieve. For example, you may aim to achieve the household energy badge by a set date. To enable this, your plan may include changing light fittings, researching green energy suppliers, replacing an inefficient heater and remembering to turn off monitors and standby appliances.

Planning the way forward for a business

For a business, it helps to have a plan that becomes part of your strategy and operations. Before you start planning in detail, see the 10 Steps Towards Sustainability. This video and step-by-step guide will help you visualise the journey. It outlines a logical, manageable process you can follow and points you to useful resources along the way.

Plan business priorities with the Sustainability Roadmap

To assess where your business is on the road to sustainability, do the Sustainability Roadmap survey. This helps you plan your direction and identify areas to focus on. The accompanying Journey Companion describes how to support this with appropriate strategies and resources.

Hint: watch the video Getting Started with Green Street – Business Edition to see how to access and use the above resources.

Use planning tools to set goals and track progress

Once you’ve identified priorities using the Sustainability Roadmap, you can follow Green Street’s Planning Process (for micro businesses or enterprises) to plan actions in more detail.

The resource includes editable templates you can use to record targets, actions, dates and progress. It also includes checklists of broader sustainability actions that will add value, improve eco-efficiency and reduce carbon.

Keep your plans achievable

Don’t be daunted by the scale of the task at hand or try to do everything at once. Focus on just one or two areas where you can make a difference. Plan specific, measurable, achievable actions. That way you’ll make clear progress and stay motivated to keep going. To see how other businesses approach this, explore business sustainability stories.

Because Green Street is a community of people and businesses who are having a go at being sustainable, you can reach out to them for help, tips, information or encouragement.

Read and post questions, updates and tips on the Community Wall

On the Green Street Community Wall, you can read about what other members are doing. To share thoughts, tips or questions, add a post from the Community Wall Posts page (or via your profile). You can also add comments to Wall and Inspiration posts.

Important: make sure to keep your posts and comments on topic, as any promotional or inappropriate contributions will be deleted.

Join Groups and share learning via Sustainable Business Networks

As a member of the Green Street community, you can join or create Groups. These provide a way to connect to other members in your area or those with similar interests. Any posts you share in a group are only visible to other group members.

Groups include Sustainable Business Networks, which comprise like-minded businesses in a local area. For example, see the Samford Sustainable Business Network group, who meet in person and share resources online.

Find or promote sustainable businesses in the directory

The Business Directory promotes businesses that are having a go at being sustainable. You can search by business name, location or keywords.

To be listed, a business must be a member of Green Street (at Level 2 or 3), have done their Green Street Score and earned at least one Badge (find out more about business directory listings here).

Keep having a go!

Sustainability relies on the combined effect of millions of households, businesses and other enterprises having a go. See if you can influence others to have a go too, and advocate for sustainable approaches at home, work or in the community.

To stay motivated, keep up with Green Street News, Inspiration and Resources, as we’re adding new content all the time. Good luck on your sustainability journey!