Page 100 - Shaping A Sustainable Future

Environmental Review Areas of Good Environmental Practice

During our environmental review with the owners & staff GymKidz, by its nature of operations, is an
of GymKidz, we explored the following environmental environmentally friendly SME. Being a service provider,
aspects: it has a relatively low carbon footprint. Examples of good
• Usage of Office utilities; environmental practice that we found include:
• Usage of a van for transport, and the possibility of a
switch to an electric vehicle; • Not having a physical office, thus incurring no usage
• Areas of good environmental practice; of office utilities (water, power)
• Waste reduction;
• Reduction of carbon emissions; and • Reducing, Reusing, Recycling and Recreating
• Environmental Education whenever possible – e.g. disposing of unwanted

Our findings are summarized as follows: materials such as paper, glass and plastic into
recycling bins and using less paper for office print-
Office Utilities outs while relying on softcopies and digital archiving.

We explored conducting an environmental review of • Keeping its usage of materials low – e.g. giving out
office utilities with the director of GymKidz, Mr Ee SK. stickers as incentives to children.
However, this was not feasible as GymKidz relinquished
physical office space at the end of February 2020. This • Not operating machinery that will incur electrical
decision, incidentally, boded in their favour as when usage.
the pandemic impacted Singapore for the rest of 2020,
most companies had staff working from home.
Switch to Electric Vehicles

The use of a commercial van to transport gym equipment
is essential to the operations of GymKidz. Most of the
gym equipment is bulky, and the space in the van that
GymKidz operates is fully maximised. A switch to an
electric vehicle to reduce carbon emission was, at first
impression, plausible.
However, further research into this area led us to
discover that hardly any commercial electric vehicles are
available in Singapore. The Vehicle Emissions Scheme
(VES) was unavailable (The Business Times, 2020).
Hence, although electric cars are rolled out in Singapore,
we hardly find electric vans on the roads.

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