Managing Director, Richard Taylor, was very pleased to be awarded Planet Mark Certification of the company’s carbon footprint at the RTM Show Live on 7th September. This sustainability certification is the result of rigorous, transparent measurement and it allows us to set measurable targets to reduce our carbon footprint.
We all understand the need to take action to reduce the effects of climate change around the world and we are committed to doing what we can. Over the last few years, we have implemented a variety of changes and business practices to help us on that journey.
These include proactively promoting low and zero-carbon emission machinery, offering a guaranteed buy-back scheme on our own RTM-branded machines because they are 95% recyclable, and making the switch to renewable energy supplies.
Ultimately, however, we felt we needed to know our true carbon footprint in order to target real reductions and measure what improvements we’re making year-on-year.
Planet Mark has helped us to report our carbon footprint for the year ending March 2022 and we are now working with our colleagues to identify ways in which we can reduce our footprint further this year as part of our journey to Net Zero.
Richard Taylor, commented …
“We’re determined to achieve annual reductions in our carbon emissions and although we’ve put in place a number of initiatives over a number of years to this end, we knew we needed to take this extra step. Now that we know exactly what our footprint is, we can set realistic targets for the year ahead and engage more specifically with colleagues, suppliers and customers to achieve those targets. There is a lot to do!”
Comments
Congratulations! What sort of changes have you implemented to reach the place you're at now - and what have you got planned for the future?
Good question! We have implemented a number of standard initiatives to reduce the carbon emissions from our buildings and reduce our energy consumption: replacing all our lighting with LEDs, replacing old, inefficient heaters with new editions that use less power, adding insulation where we can, switching away from oil heaters and switching to an electric supplier that only uses renewable sources of electricity.
On waste we have increased our recycling where possible, especially in packaging material and waste from the workshop including oil filters.
We've also switched to online software for our adminstration, accounts and CRM, which means more staff can work from home and reduces transport emissions. It's also made us more efficient generally.
For the future we're evaluating investment in solar panels and electric delivery vans amongst other things.
Alongside those more obvious initiatives that focus on our own "direct" emissions we've also been working hard to promote zero and low emission machinery to our customers, as well as opening up our engagement with suppliers so that we are doing more to impact our "indirect" emissions.
We feel that we are well and truly going in the right direction although there is a long way to go!
I hope that goes some way to answer your question?