Environment
Climate change is now generally regarded as one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world today. The earth is warming, mainly due to the generation of man-made greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of fossil fuels for transport and energy. The challenge we face is to use energy as efficiently as we can and use renewable resources whenever possible.
Reducing our energy consumption
Brakes Group need to ensure the products we supply our customers with are kept safe and in perfect condition. This involves the use of temperature-controlled environments and therefore we consume energy 24 hours a day 7 days a week. As a business we invest a great deal of time and effort into developing systems and processes to minimise our use of energy.
All our depot cold stores have recently entered into voluntary climate change agreements committing us to aim towards a target energy reduction of 12%
We now enjoy ISO 14001 Accreditation across the Brakes Group and some recent milestones include:
- Our internal Environmental Management System is continuing to be developed and it allows key decision makers to measure and monitor energy usage in every site every 30 minutes.
- We have reduced electricity usage by 967 tonnes of C02 since January 2008.
- We have reduced gas usage by over 30% since January 2007.
- New vehicles are fitted with Euro V engines and cleaner electric fridge technologies saving additional CO2.
- Invested over £800k in an energy efficient C02 refrigeration system in Hemsworth resulting in reduced ozone depleting emissions.
- Low energy LED and ambient sensored lighting trial. If this is successful it will be rolled out throughout the group
You can download our Environmental Policy here.