VEHICLE LOGISTICS & FLEET MANAGEMENT
DRIVING DOWN BARRIERS
As Mitie launches its Plan Zero commitment, Director of Sustainability Simon King looks at the ways in which companies can reduce their own carbon emissions by switching to EV.
Climate change is now arguably the most important topic for all businesses; we’re no longer just planning for today, we’re planning for future generations. For service-focused businesses, one of the biggest things we can do to minimise our environmental impact is to convert our petrol and diesel fleets to electric.
At Mitie, we’ve recently launched our Plan Zero commitment – a pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2025. As 93% of our carbon emissions currently comes from our fleet, it’s been the natural place to start our journey to Plan Zero. This commitment is crucial because not only can the FM sector reduce our own carbon emissions, but we have a critical role to play in helping all businesses achieve their own challenging sustainability commitments.
But, as with any revolution, there are challenges we’ve had to overcome on our EV journey. No one single business can solve the climate crisis alone, it’s only by sharing what we learn and encouraging more people to come on the journey that we’ll make real lasting change.
Charging ahead When considering an electric fleet, the first question on most people’s mind seems to be vehicles and availability. But in reality, the far bigger challenge is infrastructure. How and where will the vehicles charge up? This is one of the biggest barriers we’ve had to tackle, with patchy
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geographical coverage and uncertainty over whether public charge points will be available when you need them. Fortunately, as a facilities management and professional services company we have skills and expertise across our business to help address this, even so providing our drivers with regular access to charge points is at the top of our ‘things to do’ list.
Where employees have access to off road parking, we can install a charge point at their home address. However, where this isn’t possible, the solution is more elusive, particularly as our drivers tend not to be office or depot based.
To convert as much of our fleet to electric as possible, we first focused on switching the vehicles of our employees with access to off-street parking and those who regularly attended Mitie sites as well as on vans which are based at client sites. This allowed us to concentrate on the low hanging fruit first and install hundreds of charge points at employee homes and Mitie offices. We also engaged with clients early on in our adoption to ensure we could install charge points at their sites too.
Although the government plans to install 5,000 extra charge points by 2024, this doesn’t help FMs with adoption today. That’s why we’ve decided to get out there and engage with as many charge point stakeholders as possible so we can work together to invest in the charging infrastructure we desperately need if we’re going to make our switch to
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