We’re Green Investors in the Environment again

Following our annual assessment, we are thrilled to have retained our ‘Green’ accreditation – the highest level accreditation in Investors in the Environment – with a score of 73%.

To achieve Green level accreditation, an organisation is required to demonstrate continual improvement through the implementation of their Environmental Management System, working towards a minimum 2% efficiency improvement year-on-year. At Green level, the organisation is focusing on driving wider sustainability development throughout and is starting to consider their value chain with the implementation of sustainable procurement practices, and associated carbon emissions.

Key highlights

• We continue to measure and monitor our resources and uses the available data to analyse performance and influence areas of focus.
• There have been significant reductions in water (57%) and in paper use (86%) this year.
• The Climate, Ethical and Fairtrade (CEF) working group continues to meet and actions from the meetings are listed and updated.
• We continue to investigate ways to reduce the waste it produces, with wood now being separated out and collected for re-use.
• The overall carbon footprint for the Trust has reduced by 6% for location-based reporting and 14% for market-based reporting.
• Staff are encouraged to car share and bikes are readily available.
• We have started to gather more data from visitor surveys. One event had over 30% of attendees arriving by sustainable transport methods.

There is still more we can do as we work hard to become Net Zero as a Trust in the next ten years.