ENERGY MANAGEMENT & SUSTAINABILITY
THINKINGBIGGER AND SMALLER
Here, Alastair Scott, Sales Director at Robert Scott, explains how meticulously scrutinising every aspect of the company’s operational footprint to identify opportunities for incremental improvements has led to some radical thinking around carbon reduction.
Sustainability is no longer just a nice to have in the cleaning sector. With 80% of cleaning professionals stating that sustainability is important or very important to their clients, it’s become a must have for companies to win business and meet market expectations.
Cleaning manufacturer and distributor Robert Scott has long stood at the forefront of innovation within the industry; and when it comes to its approach to sustainability, it embraces a ‘marginal gains’ philosophy.
A journey of 1,000 steps At Robert Scott, we have set ourselves an ambitious goal: to become a carbon-neutral company by 2045. We know that there’s no one single change that can get us there, it’s about making many smaller adjustments in how we operate and interact with the environment around us.
By dissecting each aspect of our business, from product manufacturing to logistics, we have initiated a range of carefully calculated adaptations that collectively contribute to a substantial reduction in our carbon footprint.
While much of our success to date has come from what might be deemed more traditional and ‘obvious’ steps – using more recycled plastic, reducing plastic content in our products, cutting back on packaging, for example – others have come from more surprising and innovative places.
These range from the energy sources we employ to the way we transport products and manage waste. Each provides valuable insights to support wider industry initiatives.
From A to B and back again Heavy-duty vehicles are responsible for approximately a quarter of all CO2 emissions from road transport. We’ve therefore focused on ways we can reduce the number of miles our vehicles spend out on the road.
A key element in this strategy is ‘backhauling’, where a haulage vehicle carries out its deliveries as normal, but its return journey has been planned to ensure it either picks up items at the outbound destination or stops at companies needing to return stock or packaging on its way back. Either way, it never returns empty.
By reducing the total number of journeys required by haulage vehicles, backhauling not only maximises productivity but also produces a lower carbon footprint. In fact, we have introduced backhauling with two of our partners and have quantified that it equates to a saving of three full trucks a week.
These are incredibly impressive results that simply required us to look at more efficient ways of moving goods across the country; backhauling is something that many companies can employ with sufficient planning and coordination.
54 | TOMORROW’S FM
twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70
