Reducing Our Carbon Footprint
We wanted to find ways of reducing our carbon footprint and there are certainly many ways! But we need to start at the bottom. Balers are designed to provide a solution to waste management and reduction of waste collections.
The benefits of our new Baler:
We are down from one collection per week to one every three weeks, which is brilliant news!
Choosing Sustainable Suppliers
We feel as a company we also have a responsibility regarding the partners we select. Choosing a Supplier is also an environmentally friendly choice.
Therefore, we decided we should make the effort to choose suppliers who demonstrate they have good environmental practices.
As a result of this, we brought in the Supplier Questionnaire Form which includes environmental questions.
For example, do you have ISO 14001 accreditation (the environmentally focused certification)? We scored each Supplier on how environmentally friendly they are and allowed each company to comment on if they are actively looking to improve their environmental awareness.
Recycling
We have now started to recycle all our unwanted wooden pallets. The pallets are taken away to be fixed and reused for another process. Our plastic pallets are recyclable plastic – which can therefore be recycled by the end-user.
We have a recycling procedure in place to monitor spare material in production and spare parts. Machinists make zero or a maximum percentage of the order of spares for example: a quantity of one hundred – staff only can make 3 spares and that’s if it can’t be prevented in our manufacturing process. The spare parts or material will go into our stores which will then be re-used, if and when applicable.
All our used papers are shredded in-house and used for packing material – this helps keep the cost down but also helps with our environmental footprint. Each room has a box to put paper in then once a week we shred what is there and transfer it to packing. All our plastic bags which we use for packing are recyclable for the end-users – we are looking at alternative packing solutions.
Creating Awareness for our Employees
Staff are engaging very well with the new environmental focus – we currently have a suggestions box in which staff can put their ideas.
We have had a few amazing ideas from staff – one is to re-use the machine oil and filter it, allowing it to be reused in some of our machines. Thanks to this suggestion, we are now looking into a filter system to be able to fulfil this idea.
New Environmental Awareness Training is taking part in January 2022– split into two sessions to allow for questions to be answered and discussed in an open environment for employees.
Reducing Emissions – Energy
The increased demand for gas has pushed our prices up.
Unfortunately, global prices for fossil fuels, especially gas, are increasing at an unprecedented rate.
Here is a list of some of the sections we are looking at:
