Elmhurst’s whole reason for being is energy efficiency leading to eradication of fuel poverty and to slow carbon change. It is only right therefore that we practice what we preach and manage our own impact on the environment.

With Elmhurst pushing more than ever towards being carbon neutral, we thought we’d take some time to talk about what steps we’ve taken to achieve our current milestones. Some of our team members spent some time earlier this year calculating our carbon emissions from the last few years, with the intention of reducing our future emissions and offsetting any carbon that we generate so that we can work towards being a net zero company, with achieving net zero meaning we would offset 100% of our carbon emissions.

With COVID 19 dramatically affecting the way we work, many of our team members worked from home for a large amount of 2019/20, meaning our carbon emissions as a company were down to 22 tonnes, significantly lower than previous years, due to less time in the office and less travel overall. Elmhurst offset that carbon by funding the Woodland Trust’ to plant trees on our behalf that will, over their lifetime, offset the carbon we produced in 2021.

As business operations return to normal our target for 2022 was set at 41 tonnes. To reach this low target Elmhurst has implemented three main plans of action;

• A review of our building fabric and services (like many, we have done the easy things such as lighting and heat pumps) to see what we can do to improve energy efficiency further.
• A constant focus on staff and visitor behaviors to ensure that energy consumption is kept to a minimum and monitored through our voluntary Display Energy Certificate.
• Finally, our finance team have entered a new commercial contract with our energy company to purchase electricity that is 100% from renewable sources.

Our aim is to reduce carbon emission but where that is not possible then we, again, commit to offset our carbon emissions through tree planting

This zero carbon initiative is important to Elmhurst, as it means we can have a positive impact on society by giving something back, and even more importantly it’s a step towards reducing climate change.