Experts from industry, academia and carbon consultancies agree the cost of the carbon trading scheme will have a significant impact on small and medium size enterprises (SME) because large businesses will past costs both up and down the supply chain, affecting customers and suppliers. This comes ahead of Melbourne's Carbon Reduction and Trading Conference and Expo which aims to help SME's come to terms with the new carbon economy. They will be running from March 21 to April 2 2009.

Richard Lester from the National Centre for Sustainability says large emitters caught under the new laws are already beginning to put pressure on smaller suppliers to minimise their carbon footprints.

"While the National Greenhouse Energy Reporting Scheme (NGERS) and Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) legislation, at this stage, only have a direct impact on fairly large organisations, we are increasingly finding SMEs that supply goods and services to larger companies and to government are being asked to provide quite detailed information on their carbon footprint," he said. A key part of this information will be the embeddded carbon costs in goods and services.

The organiser of the Carbon Reduction and Trading Expo and Conference, Marie Kinsella, says many small business owners are unaware that they need to prepare now for the introduction of carbon trading on July 1, 2010. Kinsella says that although businesses with less than 20 employees account for 90 per cent of Australian employers, just 27 per cent of the 11,521 visits to last year's inaugural event were small employers. Large corporations, which make up just 1 per cent of Australian employers represented 45 per cent of visitors.