36The surprising truth about net-zero with Andrew Griffiths

About

There's a lot of jargon around net zero, but what does it actually mean? And how can you make your organization net zero?

It might seem like a daunting task, but there are under-the-radar factors that could be negatively affecting your sustainability efforts. For example, did you know that your pension fund could be killing people?

Join Andrew Griffiths, Director of Community and Partnerships of PlanetMark to: 👉Debunk the jargon around net zero  👉The basics of sustainability like forming a green team to catapult your organization to being net zero. 👉 Creating a win-win for both the planet and your bottom line profit.  👉 Spot the under the radar factors that negatively effect sustainability i.e. potentially your pension. 

📣About Andrew 

Andrew Griffiths, Director of Community and Partnerships, Planet Mark, a sustainability certification that supports organisations and real estate to measure and continually reduce carbon emissions, and increase their social impact. Andrew, chairs the Institute of Directors National Sustainability Taskforce and was a member of the UK Government’s COP26 Small Business Taskforce, as well as the Advisory Board for the Global Sustainability Film Awards.He thrives at the intersection between technology and sustainability and remains stubbornly  optimistic about how these themes will align to influence and improve the future of our workplaces, planet, and wider society.

🧁Connect: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewthomasgriffiths/ https://www.planetmark.com https://tedxsydney.com/contributor/bronwyn-king/ https://makemymoneymatter.co.uk


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Transcript

*This Transcript is Autogenerated

[00:00:27] Hey there and welcome to the hi. Hello Sura show. I'm your host Sura Al-Naimi 

[00:00:33] today on this episode, we are joined by 

[00:00:35] andrew Griffiths.

[00:00:36] Andrew is the director of community and partnerships for Planetmark. Planetmark is a sustainability certification that supports organisations and real estate to measure and continually reduce carbon emissions, and increase their social impact.

[00:00:52] Well, Andrew, welcome to the show. Andrew, I'm really excited for you to share with us. Um, what, what did you call it? Myth busting or jargon busting, Carbon jogging, carbon jogging. All right. Uh, and so your, what role, uh, planet mark, do you have? Just, I can introduce you, uh, director of community and partnerships. Well, Andrew, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. well, Andrew, you have taken on this very exciting role at planet mark.

[00:01:23] And, um, we are going to do a lot of jargon busting in just a moment, but before we get into that for our listeners, can you share with them, what is planet mark and, uh, what, what got you so excited to join this organization? Because I know you. So many, um, so many things going on prior to that, but this is the thing that you really wanted to focus on and that you're really passionate about.

[00:01:49] Yeah, of course. Um, so, you know, I, I, I was sort of in the orbit of, for a couple of years before I joined it, I was, I was just a big fan, kept rocking up at events and genuinely, there are, there are team photos from the end of events that have me in them from about two years before I actually became a member of the team.

[00:02:08] So you. Fundamentally, I I'm, I'm a passionate, I'm very passionate about sustainability is, is the first and foremost. And so I was looking for a home in which I could have the biggest possible impact within the world of sustainability and planet mark very much, uh, embodies that for me, you know, it's so at our core, we're a, a certification.

[00:02:31] So we certify organizations and real estate projects for carbon re. And the creation of social value. So what that looks like is we have sort of a bit of a three pillar process, um, measure. Cause you can't manage what you don't measure. You gotta start by understanding where you are. Um, and then we have engage and communicate.

[00:02:52] And so we have a dedicated engagement team. Whose reason for being is, is to support our members. Helping them get to grips with how are they gonna reduce their carbon? Cause they commit, you know, planet marks and market progress. You have to be reducing your carbon footprint year on year. So we have to support our members to do that.

[00:03:09] Um, we support over 600 organizations all over the world, um, from, you know, little toy shops on high streets to nursery schools, to big corporates like Volvo, uh, and uh, you know, charities like the Eden project. We, we really touch every sector. So the opportunity to have impact at scale in a really exciting, um, space with a really amazing team of, of passionate people who care about what we do, um, has been a, a huge privilege and an opportunity over the past couple of years.

[00:03:41] That's amazing. I love that your. That you were there in teen pictures. It was a sign they should have. Yeah, I did. I didn't even have an agenda at the time, actually. I just liked them. So I, I, you know, I wasn't, you know, trying to make, you know, it was one of these, I've always been an opportunist and I enjoy connecting with people where I enjoy networking.

[00:04:02] So it was one where I was just a fan of what they were doing. So I kept in touch and, and kept up with what they were were doing. And eventually I had the opportunity to get. That sounds amazing. And so, um, I know that this area, uh, can be really complex and people can get really confused and it feels like you are really simplifying that for individuals.

[00:04:25] So what are the common misconceptions you, you called it jargon, busting. And what is it that we should kind of be aware of as we, as we move through and, and consider, um, our role and, you know, our right to. Yeah. Cool. So, I mean, you know, there's a lot of confusion out there, right? There's so much lingo that gets thrown around where, you know, there's net zero carbon neutral, carbon, negative climate, positive scopes of emissions.

[00:04:51] Um, you know what, you know, what, what, when we say carbon emissions, what the heck do we mean? What about methane and oxides? And you really have to cut to the core of okay. What does this all mean? Because it can get quite overwhelming for people it's, it's often quite new to, to people that've not necessarily gotten grip before, and there's often some real fundamental things to sort of help people get to grip.

[00:05:12] So, first and foremost is, you know, when, when you hear someone like me say carbon and carbon footprint and carbon emissions, what I am usually talking about is all greenhouse gas machine. Um, we use in the industry, we use something called carbon dioxide equivalent. You'll see it written down as CO2 E and what that does is it actually, it, it, it is a summary of all of the greenhouse gases involved in your emissions because, um, you know, human beings, we're rubbish at doing too much for too many figures and variables.

[00:05:44] We wanna have non nice summarized figure. And so the way we do that is that we have something called the greenhouse gas protocol, which is developed by a scientist around the world, which basically. This much of this type of, um, greenhouse gas take methane. So one ton of methane in the atmosphere is the equivalent to 25 tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in terms of how much it warms up the planet and the way they calculate that is basically how long does it stay in the atmosphere for, and how much of a warming effect does it, how thick a blanket.

[00:06:15] Is it while it's there. And so we summarize that it's one lovely figure, which is carbon bar side equivalent. So that's, that's what we, when we say carbon footprint, that's what we mean. We're talking about all. Then we get onto the scopes of emissions and that can sound kind of daunting. Um, but you don't actually have to know all of it, but it's very useful to understand the difference between three, the three categories, scope one, scope, two scope three, right scope.

[00:06:40] One very simply is the fuel that you burn. So. If you have a petrol diesel car, if you have a gas or oil heating system, you know, if you are burning the fuel, you are directly emitting those things into the atmosphere. If you have a wood fire that is a scope, one emission burning the fuel, creating the emissions, right?

[00:07:00] It's well, within your control scope, two is the energy that you use. So, uh, you are not necessarily the one producing your electricity, but someone is burning. Coal or, you know, gas or something to create that electricity. Ideally, it's coming through renewable sources more and more, but historically, you know, someone else is burning something.

[00:07:22] That's giving you your energy. So that's your scope. Two emission is the energy that you use. So for most people in businesses, scopes one and two are your utility built and your vehicles, if you own it. Right. Very straightforward scope three. Everything else. thing is upstream. It's downstream. You've got, you know, you've got everything from easier things like business travel and employee commuting and waste to much more tricky things to get your head around.

[00:07:54] Like, Your pensions and investments. Um, how you, where you, what stuff you buy and who, from how your products are used by your customers. These things all fall in scope. There's 15 different categories of scope three. Now you don't need to know all the detail there. Um, but the thing that's really important to recognize is that when you hear people making claims, if I came to you now, and I said, I am the holiest of Holies, I am the sustainable of sustainables and I am.

[00:08:23] I then revealed that all I had measured to justify my claims was my utility bills and my car. If I owned one, right. And I'd left out the food, I eat the places I travel, the products that I buy. Um, I could be jetting around the globe on a daily basis. And I'm not including that in my measurement. And so what's important to note is that understanding what people are measuring as part of their claims is really critical and becomes very, very critical when you turn to terms like carbon neutral and net zero, because there's a big difference between the minimum threshold of what you're allowed to claim as carbon neutral.

[00:09:03] And what you're allowed to claim is net zero. Does that make sense? All so. It does make sense, but what comes to my mind is I, I, I'm sort of understanding why an organization like yours, uh, is so helpful and so valuable because I feel like this could be very daunting for an organization. Um, you know, to know all the mechanisms and, uh, you know, what do they say?

[00:09:30] A confused mind says. Yes. Right. And so, um, I think the way that, um, to, to be able to simplify it and my, I would imagine that as you work with individuals, you are, you're creating that like empowerment for them, you know, and education, but it's a very sort of in a way I would like an incremental process, you know, depending on where they're with that learning, right?

[00:09:55] Yeah. A hundred percent, um, a hundred percent. I mean, you've, you've gotta get buy in. Right. And. We start with the measurement piece, because what you then get equipped with, right, is that, do you then get, um, you know, a whole report. One of the things in that report is a lovely big pie chart and that pie chart shows you what love good pie chart love basically shows you what proportion of your emissions are coming from different areas.

[00:10:17] What proportion of your emissions are coming from your utility bills, from your electricity or from your, you know, your, your gas, right? What proportion is coming from your. And how you, how you move people around, how, how you do business travel and stuff. What proportion is coming from your waste? What proportion is coming from water consumption, different industries have very different needs.

[00:10:39] If we're talking to a farm or a garden center, they're gonna have a very different looking pie chart to a law firm. Right. And so what that pie chart does is it gives you your low hanging. Because you've, you know, where are you gonna start finding the greatest gains and the greatest cost saving opportunities, the greatest carbon saving opportunities, which are usually the same thing.

[00:11:03] You know, the, the, the cheapest, uh, units of energy is the unit that you don't use. right. So, you know, if, if you can equip yourself and go, oh, hang on. Do I want to start with the thing that is 3% of my carbon F. And come up with a whole strategy around how we reduce that. Or shall I start with a bit that's about 60% of my carbon footprint, where am I gonna find the gains?

[00:11:26] And so it helps you be more tactical and then it, then you can bring in the team and you can get, so we do with every single one of our members, we do, um, an annual Energizer session right after they get their reports. We do an Energizer. So one hour session with all of their team, as much of their team as, as we can get along to get them excited, you know, This is what this means.

[00:11:47] Here's your carbon footprint, and this is what it means to you as an organization. And let's start coming up with some ideas. What can you do in your role to help move that needle in the coming year? What can, what, what, you know, really equipping them and empowering them? Empowering, I think is key word here.

[00:12:04] Gotta empower people to feel like they can make a difference and. You measure each year and you show them that they're making a difference. And that's when you start seeing you huge shifts where, you know, so our members like, you know, sign of we've been going for nearly 10 years. Um, 2019 pre COVID. Our members reduced their absolute carbon emissions year on year by 12.

[00:12:30] Which is substantial. right. And then, you know, COVID hit and things go a bit do Laly for a while. So we've we, uh, 2020, it was a 24 and half percent production uh, year on year on average, this is across you hundreds and hundreds of companies. So, um, the point is it is possible to make substantial progress on sustainability in a relatively short space of time.

[00:12:59] That really then starts to feed this desire of the teams to go, oh wow. We did so well last year, what are we gonna do now? How, how do we move this forward? And then the critical component that I sort of did mention on the end of it. So that's, that's the engage step is doing workshops with people, helping them do employee engagement, supply chain engagement.

[00:13:18] Engaging with investors, engaging with customers. How do we get people engaged? And then we have our communicate strand, which is we have a dedicated member communications team separate from our marketing team. And their whole reason for being is just to help our members talk about what they're doing authentically incredibly, because when you do something that's really good or you learn a lesson because something didn't go as well as you wanted to take, right?

[00:13:43] The impact that you can. Tenfold twentyfold if you tell other people about it yeah. It, it just, it magnifies your impact so much more because now other people will learn the lessons that you've learned faster than you did to help other people on their own journey. So that's, that's our sort of three pillar process to really help, you know, guide people along that journey in a continuous.

[00:14:09] I love that so much. I love. So we start with the, uh, Hey, where are we at? you know, uh, and we get to our, oh, baseline, you gotta understand where are we? You know? Yeah. We get to our, and we get to our pie chart. Um, and what I love about it is you're taking in all these different inputs, uh, and then you're able to express it for them versus then having to figure it out because it is very complicated, you know, but.

[00:14:34] As you've mentioned, you are, you've dedicated all this expertise and, and you're continuing to update, right? Um, oh, a hundred percent. And, and I mean, one of another, one of the most significant things we we've done, you know, we realized a, a big part of me coming on board was, and, uh, community side of things, you know, big.

[00:14:53] Part big part of my, my role is actually recognizing one of the most impactful things that we could do for our members is to simply get out of the way in. And what I mean by that is, um, you know, we've created a community platform for our members where they can interact with each other, because if they have a question about, um, you know, I wanna install solar panels on the roof of my.

[00:15:16] How much will it cost? What's the return on investment? What's my payback period. Gonna be, what challenges am I gonna face with planning, commissions or whatever? I dunno. Um, what, what, oh yeah, they can come to us. They can ask that question and our teams will be able to give them some guidance and feedback and thoughts, but actually if they can post that in a community platform with a whole, with hundreds of organizations, Many of whom will have been there, done that, got the t-shirt or whatever their query is.

[00:15:43] Right. They're gonna get five different answers from five different companies with five different experiences. That all helps inform their approach. And it's much more convincing as an internal business case. If you can go, Hey, I wanna finance out a project to put solar panels on the roof of our factory.

[00:15:58] And here's the return on investment and payback periods of five other companies who have done it. There's my business case. Thank you very much rather than simply. Oh, well our sustainability partners told us it would be a good idea. Of course we did. But if you're hearing from other businesses, who've done it benefited.

[00:16:14] It's much, much more persua. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. So it sounds like the being able to learn from peers, uh, across industry, as well as in similar industries is really fundamental. And yeah, one of the other things that you said was really important, uh, just if we're focusing on one organization is building out that team, um, that green team.

[00:16:36] Can you talk a little bit more about why that's important. Why that is, um, you know, much more exciting than, um, having a solo voice yeah. Yeah. So, you know, a green team is one of the, one of the most impactful things that, that our business can do in the early, early days of, of trying to figure, figure some stuff out because the, the fact is sustainability is something that you will find.

[00:17:02] No end to the passion of, of your team's on, you know, there will be people in your team, you have no idea how passionate they are about this. Um, at home, in their own life, they might not be in a role that's relevant to it, but within your organization. But there, there are passionate people. And, um, so it can either be top down.

[00:17:20] I, you know, the leaders of a business can go out and look to create one, or it can be bottom up. Um, and it can be really empowering for someone who's quite junior within a company. Actually just go out and ask if there are other people who are passionate about it, just put something out on like the, you know, Microsoft teams or something going, Hey, would anyone else be interested in having a conversation about what we could do to try and be more sustainable?

[00:17:41] And you'll get a whole group of people go yeah, yeah. Up for that, you know? And then you form a group of you. And once that sort of group is established, you can share ideas, different people have different experiences, but critically, you can take ideas as a collect. Now, no matter the size of organization you're working at, if you're working in a massive corporate, or if you're working in a smaller company, you know, the power of a group of 5, 10, 15 employees coming forward and saying, Hey, you know, we think we should improve the way we recycle.

[00:18:13] Um, and we've come up with this idea. Can we take this forward? Can we take this forward, please? We're willing to invest our time and energy into this. We really wanna take this forward. Um, but we need your support. We need this money. We need this, you know, yes. On a decision or whatever. Um, it's, it's, it's much more powerful coming from a group than from just one individual.

[00:18:33] So a grain team's a powerful thing. So to give a tangible example, Um, we have, uh, one of our members, Squires garden centers. They're a, they're a chain of garden centers in the UK. And they, um, set up, uh, green teams where they, they put out a call. They said we wanna bring together a green team. We wanna have one green champion in each one of our, um, garden centers.

[00:18:59] Put yourselves forward and they were overwhelmed with the level of interest, right. They had in the green champion role for each one. And then they, you know, went through a process of choosing who was gonna, you know, be the lead for each center. And then they said, then they put out somebody saying, okay, now that's your person.

[00:19:18] Go to them with ideas for what you think the we could be doing better. And in each garden center, the green champion was deluged. With suggestions on here's, how we could reduce our water conception. Here's how we could, you know, do better on the energy. We could do this here. We need to get L E D lights in there.

[00:19:36] We just deluged. Right. And the, the amount of ideas that they drew in that these are ideas that, you know, we all know if anyone's been involved in consultancy, most of the ideas for what to do to improve. If not, all of them are already in the business. Actually what consultants do a lot of the time is simply draw out the existing ideas that lots of the team already have.

[00:19:59] They just haven't brought them out to light for one reason or another mm-hmm . Um, and if you give people a conduit to say, here's where you can share your ideas and you demonstrate to them that you're gonna take it seriously, you're actually gonna take these forwards. You'd be amazed at what can happen in, in what space, you know, a very short space of.

[00:20:19] Yes. And, and you are sort of like, it sounds like you're like harnessing the energy that's already there and you're just like, you're creating like that focus for action. Yeah. You know, by creating these teams and those points of contact. Um, and you mentioned, I mean, this, this was, um, the, a gardening organization, but you've worked, you know, with law firms, you've worked across industries and it's, it's the same, uh, the same sentiment, right.

[00:20:45] Same principle, everywhere you go. You know, this is something where, you know, sustainability is a real uniting force, really because it touches all of us, right? EV it touches every industry. It touches every team in every business. This is, you know, the, the, the department that this is most akin to is, is really finance.

[00:21:04] Every team has a budget. Every team has, uh, targets and has, you know, things that they're working towards that involve finances. Right? Sustainability is the same sort of thing, except we care a lot more about it. Most of the time budgets are annoying, but this is something people actually care about and get passionate about.

[00:21:24] And when people realize the impact they can have through work, you know, the average carbon footprint, um, sort of, of, of an per an individual person worldwide is about 12 tons. Um, no, sorry. 12 tons. Do you get seven tons worldwide, but average is seven tons, right? Much, much smaller. Developing countries in the global south, um, and much higher in others like America is I think still top for per capita, um, touch.

[00:21:51] What are some ? Yeah. Um, but you know, the, the, uh, but if, if I look at my own life and let's say I've, I've got a car for print of seven tons. I can take action in my life. You know, I can, you know, I can make sure I'm using renewable energy. I can put my pension in a good place. I can, um, eat less meat. I can recycle, I can, I can have E lighting and I can insulate my home.

[00:22:18] There's lots of things I can do, but I'm probably only gonna be saving worldwide the planet, a few tons of carbon dioxide a year. Right. But if I go into my office and. A, I can influence other people. I can encourage other people on their journeys. And now my impact is magnified, however many fold. But if I'm, you know, we had a great presentation from another one of our members, Steven Georgian partners, who are an architect firm.

[00:22:46] And he, you know, one of their team, uh, Simon worked out, he's got great slide that goes with this, where he is like, here's my little cube of me. That's my seven tons. I managed to reduce by three tons by doing all of this. Then I measured the, uh, the calm footprint of my team, just the, our part of the office in the building that we're in and the footprint that we have as a, as a team.

[00:23:10] And it's like 10 times the size. And then he goes, oh, and then I looked at the, um, calm footprint of the projects that my team works on. We build houses. And the projects that my team works on is now this whopping big cube of all. If we make an impact and reduce the carbon emissions of these houses, whoa, massive impact.

[00:23:30] And then he went, okay, and here's the carbon footprint of the entire sort of all of the asset classes that all of the different teams across Georgia partners work. And it, and literally it's this cube that took over the entire screen. That's this tiny little cube that was him. And he's going, you know, I can.

[00:23:49] I can reduce my own footprint by three tons, and I'm gonna do that. And you, he feels good about that, but I can shave 700 tons off of a big development I can, the impact I can have is so much greater. So it's empowering people to realize that through. They're working lives through the work they do in the communities.

[00:24:10] If they're engaged in the local area as counselors or politicians or whatever, the impact that you can have through engaging in communities is, is huge. I love that. Cause it's like an exponential ability to have impact. Um, that's really, really powerful. So when we think about, um, these organizations, let's say they're, they're interested, um, they're peaked, uh, you know, what, what are some, what, like, what are two things that you like, okay, like this is like, these are your next steps to get going.

[00:24:44] Uh, and, and it might just be, Hey, get in touch with your organization. So , I don't, that goes without saying, but the, no, the, uh, the, um, You know, the, where the low hanging fruit tend to lie. Right. Is, um, first and foremost, if you aren't on a renewable energy provider already do it, you'll probably save money.

[00:25:07] right. All right. Like just, yeah. Get, get, you know, that's one of the fastest things that you can do that will have a big impact straight away. Second is looking at where your money is because the bank that you use as an individual or as a business, Um, and who uses your pension provider has a disproportionate impact so much so that on an individual personal level, I could become a vegan.

[00:25:38] I could have no car. I could take no flights at all. I could recycle everything that I use and it would still be 10 times more impactful on my carbon footprint. To shift my pension away from fossil fuels. Right? So if you are in with a generic pension plan, you're probably investing in fossil fuels and more tobacco warfare.

[00:26:11] J, it's just, it's just sort of a guarantee. There's a fantastic campaign called make my money matter. That was started by Richard Curtis. Who's the director of love actually. Mm. Um, and he started that campaign after seeing a Ted talk, a phenomenal Ted talk. Uh, you can look up, it was by a doctor. She, um, she was a surgeon surgeon, and she was a sort of throat and throat, mouth, nose surgeon.

[00:26:36] So she spent most of her time career. Operating on tumors and, and helping people with throat, nose and mouth tumors. And, uh, you know, she felt pretty good about it. And on the off chance her hospital that she happened to be working in she's years and years and years into her career. At this point, she goes in, they, they just book her in for a financial advice session, free of jobs.

[00:27:00] She's like, oh, you get to go in and ask. She's like, OK, I'll go along. She goes along and, and, uh, she's like, OK, tell me about you. How am I doing? Is it all good? I presume my pension's doing quite well. You whatever. And they were like, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, did you wanna, you know, uh, have a look at, you know yeah.

[00:27:17] You are invested in this thing. So, um, okay. So out of interest, what am I invested in? What are the, oh, you're invested in lots of things. You've got this whole spread across the market. Okay. So what are the top sort of five, 10 companies that my pension is. And, uh, oh, well, and he gave her the top five and four of the top five were tobacco companies.

[00:27:44] Wow. And, uh, you know, being a scientifically minded character, she went and worked out. She calculated based on she, you know, she had a good size pension surgeon. She'd been had it for years. She went and she worked. But based on her investments into the tobacco industry and because of the fatalities and right.

[00:28:08] You know, the deaths, death rate of smokers that was caused by smoking, she worked out that she had personally been responsible for killing more people than she had saved as a surgeon. Wow. That's so tragic and right. And unknown. Yeah. And most of it's just, it's out of sight out of mind, we just go with what, oh, our employer set us up on our pension.

[00:28:30] We're off. Well, you know, so our 401k, it's just, it's being dealt with. I don't need to think about it. Don't need to worry about it, but it matters hugely where your money is. And, and you will find if you haven't looked at this before, you will find that your money is invested in things that you do not agree with.

[00:28:49] You will find that it is invested. Uh, tobacco, you will find that it is invested in gambling. You will find that it is invested in weaponry and arm warfare. You will find that it is invested in oil and gas, you know, and it's not to say, you know, your personal views of your own on each of these things.

[00:29:09] Absolutely. Right. But if you haven't looked, share and if you can move your money towards something that aligns more with your values, do. The individual that you just spoke out is her name. Um, I just looked it up Bronwin king. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah, I'll put those links in the show notes as well as the, make my money matter.

[00:29:33] As well as of course, planet mark, as well as of course, LinkedIn, all of those will be there, but that's really, um, Andrew that's really startling cuz it's, it's not something I would've considered. Um, no it's and it it's, it sits beneath the radar. So there's, you know, there's the practical actions that there's lots of things that you can do to save money.

[00:29:52] There's lots of things you can invest in around reducing your energy costs, reducing your cost of waste. You know, before getting into sustainability, I worked at an electronic company, right. And one of the biggest bug bears of a lot of the staff was that we weren't recycling. Right. And I heard it so many times different people going, oh, it's so annoying.

[00:30:12] We don't have recycling bins in the office. And I took it a problem. I was just like, I, I won't work for a company that doesn't recycle. I'm gonna sort this out. And so I went to the facilities manager. I said, give me the last 12 months of bills for our. Mmm, show me how much we're spending on our waste that we're currently putting out.

[00:30:30] And I'm gonna go and find you a better deal. And I very simply, I rent out to a few waste providers. I gave them the stats that I got from those invoices in terms of the volume of waste that we had. And I said to them, could we save money by recycling? And they went, yeah, of course. Um, and we ended up right.

[00:30:52] We ended up staying with the same waste management provider. We didn't change. Supplier, but simply cause we started recycling. We went from a zero recycling model to 87% of our materials being directly recycled. And the remaining 13% being used as waste to energy. So it be burned and used to generate energy.

[00:31:17] So we became a zero landfill company overnight when the, when we shift just ch just changed the products that we were on with our supplier. And they brought some more bins in the total investment was about 150 pounds to get some new bins around the office. Right. Um, and, and, you know, little bits of signage and stuff.

[00:31:38] And we ended up saving a thousand pounds, a. That's direct to the bottom line. That's that's 12,000 pounds a year gone straight onto your profit margin because now it's not a cost anymore. And the reason for that was because the, the waste management company can sell the recycling. So anything we recycled didn't cost us anything.

[00:32:01] They were free, free bins, but they were like, but if you're giving us like landfill waste, then yeah, it costs you. Of course it does. We have to pay the dispose of it. So you have to pay us two dispose of it, whereas recycling, we can sell that off. That's an asset, that's a resource. So you know, this there's huge.

[00:32:19] It's one of these things where sustainability just makes good business sense. Just it's just logical. I love that because that, that really empowers an individual to kind of come at it from that angle. If, um, you know, the straight up sustainability push is not, um, persuasive. Right. Uh, it least depending on the organization that you work with, that cap, you know, mindset wise, it could be in a different place.

[00:32:43] Um, so at all levels, it makes sense. Yeah. Brilliant. Well, thank you for your time. I was so grateful for, um, for you sharing and, uh, if somebody wants to find out more or wants to get in touch, what is the best way to do. Uh, LinkedIn is, is, tends to be where I'm personally most active. And then of course, uh, planet mark.com for, uh, you know, getting in touch with learning more about planet.

[00:33:12] Um, but yeah, no, it's, you know, and there's lots of resources and stuff that you'll find through planet. We've got a lot of toolkits that you can download free of charge on, uh, you know, how to set up a green team. We've got one, uh, on, you know, sustainability champion. We've got one on basic sort of beginners footprinting and we've got a whole array of new ones coming on.

[00:33:32] How to reduce your energy, how to reduce your water, how to reduce your waste, all these toolkits. And we have free eLearning available through, um, Amazon. We'll be coming up we're launching next week. So, um, we're collaborating with Amazon on, uh, free e-learning series of videos called net zero, um, net zero carbon jargon, busting and stuff on, um, the Amazon small business accelerator program.

[00:33:56] Um, so you can find all that through planet Bart website or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Amazing. Well, 

[00:34:03] thank you so much for your time. And, I will put everything that we have described URLs ways to contact in the show notes and, listeners, , I'd love to hear from you the value that you got from our conversation, because your comments really inspire, , the future ones.

[00:34:21] Until next time I am your host Sura Al-Naimi.