Sustainability for business

I'm Martin Howitt, I'm the managing director of Grantham Manufacturing Ltd.

This is a business which was started in the late Sixties by my father, so I moved into it in the late Seventies as the second generation.

Moved it from being a gasket making business to the business that it sort of evolved into today, which is specialist paper converting.

About 2014 we had a factory fire, and that destroyed all of our factory and all of our manufacturing capability.

So when the fire took place, you know, you're faced with a heck of a challenge, you either fall over and run away from it or you get stuck into it, and you take on a vast challenge of rebuilding your business swiftly.

We came up with a dream of how we wanted the factory to look going forward in order that we can future-proof ourselves, but that was going to take a big investment at that time and a business looks rather critical when everything's burnt down.

You need to have somebody that's going to have a lot of faith in your business plan, and I'm pleased to say that the relationship manager we've got with Barclays bought into my dream as to how we were going to rebuild this business.

In designing and building a new factory we wanted to make sure we built features into that to reduce its carbon impact, so we applied for and we got permission to put 272 solar panels on the brand new roof that we were building.

We're now in a situation where we are generating over a period of 12 months, 58% of our own electricity.

We also harvest our rainwater.

We've got a 10,000 litre tank in the ground.

So all the rainwater is gathered, filtered, and we can use that in our processes.

In addition, we've got a ground source heating system.

We've got boreholes in the ground, so the system is pre-heated by the temperature of the earth, which is generally ten degrees, and that is what's responsible for maintaining the temperature in the factory.

More recently, we've invested in a specially designed for us, water cooled air compressor.

I'm excited to be a part of seeing the third generation come into this business.

My two sons have joined and brought their own skills base to it in order they can take the business plan forward and into the future.

So the business now carries on trying to work at the sustainability model that we've got, be it from sources of raw materials or all the features we built into this factory and I'm very passionate that that's one of the legacies that I want to leave behind in this business for the next generation to build on.

My name is Mark Lee and I farm here with my wife Jenny.

We are at Park House Organic Farm.

We milk 130 Friesian Jersey cross cows who are outside on grass for 300 days a year.

And we use the milk to produce our own cheese and butter.

Having sprayed a field back in 2016 to get rid of some weeds and one of the nozzles in our sprayer blocking, the field was striped and we realized the cows are grazing the bits that hadn't been sprayed.

So that was our light bulb moment where we thought, well, what are we actually doing by spraying the fields?

And then we took the next step, which was becoming organic and thinking more about the soils and the grasses that we grow so that we had full control over what the cows were eating.

We became 100% PFLA certified, so we just feed the cows pasture because we don't use chemical fertilizer, we don't spray, we don't use any pesticides.

We're trying to farm with nature rather than battling against it constantly because it is only ever going to be one winner.

We work closely with our relationship manager at Barclays.

We really value having that personal, traditional touch.

This is a third generation farm, and my dad and my granddad both banked with Barclays and they have seen many changes on the farm and they're always there to discuss any changes, any new ideas we have.

When you make fundamental changes to the way that you farm, it comes at a cost.

So we needed to partner up with a bank that we could trust and a bank that we knew would deliver for us.

We produce cheese and butter for over 20 different outlets locally within Cumbria.

We're producing and selling milk directly to six coffee shops, and we're reducing the amount of plastic in that supply chain.

It's really important in terms of a connection for people to understand where their food’s from and it gives us a great opportunity to explain how we farm and why we farm and how that product is directly related to where they live.

I'm Sarah Melhuish.

I'm Marketing Manager here at the world of Beatrix Potter Attraction and the Old Laundry Theatre.

The World of Beatrix Potter is a beautiful, enchanting walk through exhibition of Beatrix Potter's 23 tales.

So you really feel like you're walking through the pages of her books with sights, sounds, and even some smells of the farmyard or Mrs Tiggywinkles washing.

Sustainability is a really key part of our ethos here at the attraction and the Old Laundry Theatre.

It's the strand that goes through everything we do here, and it's also carrying on the legacy of Beatrix Potter, who wanted to protect the Lake District and the environment.

We wanted to find a much more sustainable solution to our theatre lighting so this year we've changed all our theatre lighting to LED lights, which are much more energy efficient.

My name is Andrew and I am the in-house technician for the Old Laundry Theatre.

We swapped over to LED lighting because we were on Tungsten Halogen, which is quite an old technology and it's quite wasteful in terms of energy.

With our old setup, we were burning the equivalent of 25 electric kettles.

With this one, we are actually down to three.

So we have reduced our energy footprint by 88%.

I'm Tim Wright.

I work in the garden.

So I've been here now for 13 years, and in all that time, we've been as sustainable and environmentally friendly as we can.

Six years ago, we bought an electric van.

We charge it from photovoltaic cells that we have on the roof.

We have organic seed that we grow.

We cut it, we take it down, it can be used within the hour from being cut here to being on somebody's plate at the attraction.

Small steps, but something that we can all do.

Our relationship manager at Barclays really does get our business and so it's been a great part of our sustainability journey.

We're really happy with our sustainable solutions here.

I think it's everyone's social responsibility to do as much as we can to try and protect our planet as we go forward, so we would really encourage other businesses to try and do as much as they can too.

My name is Richard Odendaal, and I'm the Managing Director of AGS Support Facilities Limited.

AGS Support Facilities Ltd is a business that provides two bespoke solutions into supported housing.

The first one is a concierge and safeguarding service, which covers our customers' homelessness, accommodation properties overnight and on weekends when the support workers go home.

The second service we offer is more of a recruitment offering whereby we place staff on temporary contracts to cover day shifts such as support workers recovery workers, reception staff, etc.

We decided some time ago that we wanted to make a change to our fleet of vehicles within our business.

So we approached Barclays who were very helpful in helping us fund some new electric vehicles.

Several benefits we've noticed since moving across to electric vehicles are the tax incentives available for companies who switch to electric vehicles or fleets of electric vehicles.

The other thing for us was obviously lowering our carbon footprint and becoming more sustainable as a business in terms of our CO2 emissions, etc.

Having been in business for 25 years, I believe that business is all about relationships.

Reciprocal relationships is obviously the type of relationship you want, but we're very, very fortunate to have that sort of relationship with Barclays.

Our Relationship Manager at Barclays is very responsive, always available when we need them.

I believe that we all need to make little changes to try and protect our future in terms of being more sustainable, such as driving EVs, switching the way we power our home and just making little changes across the board.

Sustainability doesn't need to be an insurmountable challenge for businesses.

Our suggestion would be looking at it in bite size chunks and all the little changes that you can make, make a difference.