Our journey to Carbon Neutral…
Our parent company Southern Trident is currently a carbon neutral company. This means we have measured our overall footprint at a top line level to capture the amount of carbon we create by moving product materials like coir around and the running of our sites. Also, the footprint we create in day to day operations like commuter travel, logistics, energy use, IT etc.
We understand carbon offset doesn’t mean we make products without an impact on the environment and currently this isn’t possible across manufacturing industries. It is a temporary solution, as we work behind the scenes to reduce carbon emissions as much as possible at the source.
From the creation of our manufacturing business Southern Trident we have minimised our carbon creation as much as possible will continue to do so. We want to reduce the amount we offset, by minimising what we create in the first place. This goes from buying electrical goods with a high energy rating to using an eco-friendly search engine https://www.ecosia.org/
What are we planning on doing moving forward for carbon neutrality?
Our work in this area is being extended so we achieve PAS 2060 for any new products we are about to launch (stay tuned!), as well as for our existing product lines.
We have an action plan as part of PAS 2060 to highlight things we need to implement to reduce our footprint further. We are not allowed to just measure the footprint, offset it, and then sit on our laurels.
With this in place we can develop the next level of the plan which is to go Carbon Net Zero. This is a much longer-term plan, possibly 2030 or even 2040 as to achieve this our entire supply chain must be Net Zero which is no small feat. Like other companies and online suppliers, we have the challenge surrounding vehicles and the fleet. Transporting goods by road produce the most significant volume of emissions during the fulfilment process.
Some people suggest importing material from the other side of the world cannot be sustainable or ‘green’. Yet, you might be interested to know the carbon footprint of shipping coir from India to the UK is 5.5% of the total carbon footprint in the supply chain. There’s more carbon used bringing bark from Scotland to Liverpool in the UK than there is taking coir from India to the UK! So, the number of miles and impact at each stage of the journey from coconut to compost is more complex than people often realise.
What is PAS 2060: 2014 certification and what does it mean/ bring?
“Appropriate for use by organizations operating in the horticultural sector, intending to undertake a programme of GHG emission reduction of their product lifecycle or those needing to provide information on the GHG emissions from their products to downstream business partners.”
This in essence means measuring the entire footprint for each specific product. It includes all carbon produced to create/manufacture/harvest each ingredient of the products, packaging, manufacturing and shipping. This means we can say a bag or box of peat-free compost produces x Kg’s of carbon and we can then offset it.
We’re the first company in this industry to go to this level. It takes a long time as the number of variables is vast. Yet, with a dedicated member of the team working on this, we are speeding up the process.
