FLOORING
ENERGY MANAGEMENT & SUSTAINABILITY
MAKING SUSTAINABILITY THE PRIORITY
Joel Quick, Sustainability Manager at Northwood Hygiene Products, talks to Tomorrow’s Facilities Management about how the business is boosting its sustainability credentials and how FMs can benefit.
Q Q
: Why is sustainability important to FMs?
Facilities managers are under pressure to build sustainability into every touchpoint in a building. Washrooms, for instance, use large volumes of soap, water, toilet tissue and hand towels every day. They require energy to heat and light them and electricity is needed to power hand dryers. It’s vital for FMs to specify solutions that curb water and energy usage and consumables that are made from recycled materials and that can be recycled.
: What is Northwood doing to contribute?
As a manufacturer of recycled tissue, our business is all about circularity, so it’s very important to us to do everything we can to preserve our resources and minimise the amount of waste our business generates.
Three-quarters (75%) of our products are made from recycled paper and all of Northwood’s paper mills now produce Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified base sheet paper.
Q
: How have you become more sustainable?
We’ve made progress in all key areas with significant impact. Firstly, we have invested in a new fleet of lorries, which are more advanced than our previous fleet. We replaced half our fleet in 2023 with plans to replace the remaining half in 2024, plus expansion plans to increase the size of fleet. The new lorries have already helped us to reduce our CO2 emissions by 8% within our logistics network.
We’ve continued to invest in new converting assets across the business with state-of-the-art technology which is much more energy efficient than its predecessor. This strategy has supported our pledge as a business to reduce our reliance on finished goods suppliers in Europe and we now manufacture more than 95% of our paper products in the UK.
We have made a multi-million-pound investment into a new generation heat recovery boiler at our Disley paper mill. This plays a significant role in our Net Zero strategy, utilising waste heat in our operation and ultimately reducing our carbon emisisons at the site.
We’ve introduced plastic-free packaging - initially on our Whisper Eco product, with plans to roll this out across other product categories. We’ve also introduced paper and board packaging for our hand towel assortment and removed plastic tape, which has enabled us to reduce plastic by over 67 tonnes a year.
Finally, we have extended our sourcing policy to ensure that our supply chain is fully on board with the same sustainability principles as us. This means that all the paper and board goods we purchase, such as labels, boxes and cores, are FSC certified, just like our finished goods.
Q 56 | TOMORROW’S FM
: When do you hope to be carbon zero?
We have committed to be there by 2050. We now formally measure our carbon footprint and have an ambitious plan to be better at what we do.
As part of our strategy to reduce our emissions and make a positive step towards sustainability, we are now formally
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