Renewable energy and sustainable operations

Energy-efficient production has always been part of our business model, so over the years we’ve identified and implemented several large-scale energy-saving opportunities. Some highlights have been:

• Sawdust-to-heat. In a typical year we convert over 10,000 tonnes of sawdust into energy in biomass boilers at our Runcorn and Howden factories. This is enough sawdust to fill 13 Olympic swimming pools, and it would otherwise have to have been transported elsewhere to be reused. Using it to heat our factories also saves us money. The energy generated by our biomass boilers is typically equivalent to the average electricity consumption of over 10,000 households.
• Reconfiguring our factory extraction and compressed air systems to deliver significant energy-use reductions.
• Installing LED lighting across factories, warehouses and depots to save energy.
• Installing energy monitors at a process level.to give our engineering and operations teams the ability to see the energy consumption at an individual process level and to identify possible savings more easily.

ISO 14001. Our manufacturing, warehousing and transport have been certified to ISO 14001 Environmental Management System. This assures us that we have sustainable processes in place and encourages us to look for improvements.

Renewable energy. Substantially all of our estate now use grid electricity from renewable sources backed by Renewable Energy Guarantees or Origin (REGO).