Reversing climate change now

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
• Top trend predictions for Christmas 2021
• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

This will be my final blog in the series following our very successful environmental conference a few weeks ago now.

I have already mentioned that there was a clear desire from those attending the event to go back to their homes and businesses and implement change now.  In fact, there is a clear desire generally at present to stop ourselves being so selfish in terms of this planet’s resources and make change now.  So, at the risk of this blog being a little ‘list-y’ I am going to tell you about all the changes we have made at Cotswold Fayre during the past couple of years.

We have reduced the size of our regular waste bin by two-thirds forcing us to think about waste and drive us all to recycle more.  This has been helped by removing virtually all the personal rubbish bins in the office and having two large paper recycling bins within each of our two offices, which are collected regularly for shredding and recycling.  Year to date we have saved 10 trees.  We use 100% recycled toilet paper from “Who Gives a Crap” – half of the profits from this company go towards building toilets for those who don’t have any.  Low energy hand driers have been installed in our loos and all paper towels have also been removed.

Our cleaning materials have been changed to organic products that do not damage the environment and a while back we switched our electricity supply to one that is 100% renewable using Ecotricity.  For internet searching we have switched from Google (who are carbon neutral) to another called Ecosia, which does better than that and removes Co2 from the atmosphere through tree planting.  Each internet search removes 1Kg of Co2.  We now have our first electric company car but for those of the team still driving around in diesel cars we offset all the carbon involved in business travel across the whole company including aeroplane flights.

I have already mentioned City Harvest who collect all our waste food to prevent emission caused via landfill and we also work with Wokingham Food Bank at a similar level.  We are also starting a scheme to incentivise our staff to be greener at home too, and many have switched to Bulb for their home energy benefitting both themselves and our charity in Kenya at the same time.

These are just some of the changes we have made at Cotswold Fayre. You may well be ahead of us, but if not, then I challenge you to explain why you can’t implement change this week on some of these levels.  Yes, I know they are small changes, but added together if every small to medium sized business in the UK made similar changes, the impact would be enormous.  Go on, do it!