Environmental Impact

Passionate about working smarter for our environment.

With an estimated 10 billion people on the planet by 2050, it’s vital that we protect our environment and conserve natural resources. We’re passionate about working smarter to improve our environmental impact by saving energy, improving our energy efficiency and preventing waste.

Saving energy

Since FY’23, when we returned back to manufacturing, we have reduced our Scope 1 & 2 emissions (associated with our buildings and vehicles) by over 5%.

As a consequence of increasing our internal manufacturing capabilities, our electricity consumption has increased.  This is in addition to the provision of workplace EV (electric vehicle) chargers, which are available freely for our employees.   However we will continue to actively look at ways to mitigate this increase.  The easier projects are already complete, such as fitting LED lighting throughout the organisation.  We will continue to look for opportunities to improve our position, which will include self-generation of power through solar.

Overall, we’ve reduced our energy consumption by over 1.5 million kilowatt-hours since 2019, avoiding over 400 tonnes of CO2 emissions. For example, we’ve:

  • introduced LED lighting and motion sensors – powering our distribution centres with renewable energy
  • removed vending machines where they’re not being used regularly
  • used intelligent building management systems to provide efficient heating for our offices and distribution centres.
  • For air conditioning, we have held educational walk throughs with troublesome areas, exampling the ideal temperature and settings, ideally 22 degrees, auto and low fan. This has helped towards the reduction in energy usage.
  • daily / weekly adjustment of communal area heating set points and lighting levels, following the weather patterns / staffing levels.
  • winter plan, where we assign communal spaces during this period, reducing office occupancy when temperatures are lower.

Since FY’22 we have seen a 23% reduction in natural gas consumption through:

  • reducing the space heating set point across the site
  • introducing new space heater technology at the end of life of heaters, which are more energy efficient uing less gas & electric (reusing heat build-up in chamber periodically and smaller motors)
  • distribution centre altered working patterns, meaning heating off from 2am Saturday instead of 6am
  • better management of external doors, meaning fewer cold draughts and temperature fluctuations.
  • Linking troublesome external doors to heaters.  This ensures doors are closed as soon as the activity completes.
  • replacement of 50yr old asbestos roof with a better insulated roof, protecting from external cold temperatures.

Preventing waste

Through good design and processes, we are work hard to maximise the recyclability of non-recyclable waste. To achieve this, we’re:

  • working closely with our customers to forecast demand and prevent the waste of our products
  • investing in internal print management system solutions; we’ve halved the volume of paper we print within our operations since 2019
  • strengthening our internal ‘Plastic Isn’t fantastic’ initiative; so far we’ve banned plastic cutlery and cups, introduced reusable coffee cups and recyclable paper napkins, and started collecting more items for recycling, including batteries.