July 2024 marked our internal sustainability awareness month, Grattes Goes Green. Our sustainability team partnered with the newly founded Grattes Green Committee and the marketing team to provide all staff with a series of activations, activities and inspiring knowledge to grow awareness across the business.
Meat Free Mondays
Making just one day a week meat-free can have a huge impact on your carbon footprint. So in our Kings Cross HQ canteen, The Waterside, we made Mondays meat-free, offering only vegetarian options throughout the day. Staff enjoyed both breakfast and lunch options over the month, even those who initially kicked back at the idea!
Meet the Green Committee
Our Journey to Net Zero will require many changes – some small, some large – to our work and personal lives. The Green Committee is Gratte Brothers’ forum for channelling these changes and exploring how we can build more sustainable lives across all corners of the business.
We spoke to a few of the ‘Greenies’ to find out more about the people driving sustainable change throughout the business, profiling them to our staff and enabling colleagues to connect with the Green Committee.
Tips on your Sustainable Self
There’s so much more to sustainability than putting your [clean & empty] plastic bottles in the recycling. What you eat, how you travel, the home you live in and the things you buy make significant impacts into personal carbon footprints.
We gave Gratte Brothers staff a helping hand with getting their head around a more sustainable life, sharing some curated top tips and myth-busting facts.
WWF Carbon Calculator
Everyone has a carbon footprint. Your day-to-day decisions, living conditions, commuting and holiday choices all impact the globe. Thanks to WWF, everyone can now easily find out what their carbon footprint is.
We encouraged our staff to find out their own carbon footprint and submit their results. Thanks to a great turnout we found out some interesting facts about the sustainable behaviours of Gratte Brothers staff.
- Smallest footprint: 7 tonnes
- UK average footprint: 8.8 tonnes
- Largest footprint: 24.2 tonnes
- World average footprint: 6.3 tonnes
- Average footprint: 12.25
- Our average footprint is 139.2% of the UK average and 194.4% of the global average
Commuting Survey
A key part of making our net zero dataset even stronger is understanding the emissions from our employee commuting. Our annual commuting habits survey provides our environment and sustainability team with insights and data that help the business make progress on our Journey To Net Zero.
What we are doing as a business
Sustainability requires changes across the business, some small and some huge. What’s important is that we continue to make progress. At Gratte Brothers, our Journey To Net Zero encompasses our overall goal of becoming wholly sustainable. In particular, we are making changes in scopes 1 & 3, with scope 2 already net zero. The Journey To Net Zero is further supported with our Planet Pillars and HSEQ Targets.
We also run several partnerships that instil sustainable practices in our business.
Protec – Protec is a ClosedLoop remanufacturing scheme allowing us to send back all used floor and wall protection materials that are made into brand new materials for us to purchase. At one of our sites in Slough, this has accounted for savings equivalent to 10 tonnes of CO2, the carbon equivalent of 529 trees.
Community Wood Recycling – Our wood waste is taken to be reused in workshops or turned into new, useful resources such as pellets or chips. None enter landfills or the waste stream. In just the first quarter of this year, we already rescued 14 tonnes of wood from the waste stream, equating to a 7-tonne CO2 saving.
Avena Workwear – The new partnership with Avena ensures all used PPE and workwear are recycled and turned into new workwear available for purchase. This stops any PPE going into skips on-site, allowing for the development of a circular system.
Summary
Major change is indeed in the hands of Governments, large corporations and the top 1% (who produce the same emissions as the poorest 66% globally) to drive legislation and practices that nerf and reverse the impacts witnessed. But by instilling sustainable practices in our work and personal lives we are doing our bit and economically encourage those with more power to make the necessary changes.
Hopefully, everyone has learnt something new over the past month. We thank everyone who took part in the month of activity, in particular all of those who tried out the vegetarian meals on Meat Free Mondays. There was also a great turnout for the WWF Carbon Calculator, so thanks to everyone who took part and encouraged their colleagues to submit theirs. As we mentioned before, there’s still time to complete the commuter survey. Please take a couple minutes of your day to complete the questionnaire, we are collecting results until the end of the week.
