Sustainability

According to the UN, sustainability means…

“Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

For businesses, this means continuing to succeed whilst taking action to eliminate social and environmental damage.

Valpak’s team of dedicated environmental consultants will support your business to achieve its sustainability objectives, make it more robust for the future, and more attractive to customers, investors, and employees.

A sustainability consultancy provides the expertise and data to help you to reduce your business’s impact on the environment and society.

Valpak’s sustainability consultancy has:

• Access to data, particularly on the environmental impacts of products and packaging
• Access to Valpak’s expertise in collecting data from supply chains
• Skills and knowledge around sustainable practices, regulation, and issues
• A dedicated team to help your business on a project-by-project or ongoing basis

In essence, improving resource productivity means producing the same level of output by consuming fewer resources (examples are making better use of what is there already, shifting away from fossil-based energy and fuels, eliminating waste, and removing packaging that has no purpose).

Our team of expert sustainability consultants can help by taking your business through the following iterative process to reduce carbon emissions:

• • Measure quantify your carbon footprint
    • o Analyse scope 1 and 2 emissions and some scope 3 (in line with Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR))
    • Establish broader scope 3 impacts if required
  • Identify hotspots
    • Focus on measuring these accurately with bespoke studies
    • Feedback improved results in overall measurement
    • Discover and recommend reduction opportunities to help your business to implement change
    • Conduct energy audits, market research, and share best practices, to realise energy-saving opportunities
  • Monitor changes/improvements
    • Repeat measurements as required to track progress and monitor change
      • Report improvements to your customers and stakeholders

We can help your business implement and embed carbon management strategies through Life Cycle Assessments, Carbon footprinting, Environmental Product Declarations, and energy auditing to minimise your business’s carbon emissions and reduce energy bills.

The Energy Savings Opportunities Scheme (ESOS) and Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) are the UK’s mandatory carbon reporting regulations.

Valpak offers a one-stop-shop compliance service for both of these regulations.

Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting

SECR affects companies that exceed at least two of the following three thresholds in a financial year:

• 250 employees
• £36m annual turnover
• £18m balance sheet total

Obligated businesses must include a carbon report in their annual financial statement. Valpak can take a business’s data, carry out the calculation, and will provide copy for the report.

Even if a company is not required by law to produce a SECR report, there are benefits as the reporting process can improve efficiencies that can be reported to stakeholders.

Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme

All businesses that are large (250+ employees OR turnover £44m+ and balance sheet £38m+ on 31 December 2022) or part of a corporate group containing at least one large business will be required to participate.

Affected businesses will need to complete a carbon report, undertake a carbon audit (by the lead assessor for the ESOS scheme – Valpak can undertake these), implement carbon reduction initiatives, and track progress.

The start point is to measure your carbon footprint. Valpak Consulting helps clients to calculate their carbon footprint on a regular (often annual) basis to meet both regulatory and voluntary requirements.

This can be done by carrying out carbon footprints or Life Cycle Assessments.

A company’s organisational carbon footprint can be measured regularly by considering:

• Scope 1 emissions (direct consumption of fuels such as gas or petrol)
• Scope 2 emissions (consumption of electricity)
• Scope 3 emissions (consumption of core products and services that are delivered by a third party to meet your corporate demand)

Your business may be obliged to review carbon emissions every year under Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) or every third year under the Energy Saving Opportunities Scheme (ESOS).

Please get in touch so we can arrange for one of our expert sustainability consultants to call you to identify areas you want to improve and how we can help.

There are a variety of standards that need to be met for Environment Social Governance and sustainability reporting, so we will need to devise a plan that works for your business.

The COP’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C means that all businesses need to take steps to reduce carbon emissions.

“The transparency and comparability of sustainability efforts can be expected to improve significantly in the near future. In turn, this means that enterprises need to ensure that their carbon accounting and net-zero target setting is up to par by adopting science-based carbon accounting.”

We offer a range of services to help investigate your business’s environmental impacts. You should start preparing to report data and should have a net-zero plan available to share.

See FAQ – How can my business reduce carbon emissions? Plus strategy development.

We offer a Horizon Scanning service that will identify any regulations that affect your business in specific countries. In the UK we have the Energy Saving Opportunities Scheme (ESOS) and Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) Regulations.

We also work with companies who are not obligated but voluntarily wish to measure/monitor and reduce their carbon footprint or their broader environmental footprint.

We can help customers set targets in line with the Science-based Targets Initiative (SBTi).

The three pillars of corporate sustainability are:

• Environmental
• Economic
• Social

For social, we provide Modern Slavery compliance and Sustainable Supply Chains services.

For environmental we provide tailored Carbon Management services where we can help business to comply with UK energy legislation – ESOS and SECR, and undertake Life Cycle Assessments and waste audits. We also provide a  Zero Waste to Landfill certification service.

For economic we offer Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) cost mitigation (bespoke services to help businesses reduce costs the reforms to the Packaging Waste Regulations will bring, by helping businesses to identify areas where positive changes can be made). We can also carry out Energy Audits.

Your business would need to review the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), align to the ones that are most relevant, develop actions to achieve improvements, and implement them across the business, and its supply chain.

Your business would have to ensure compliance with certain laws and standards. “ESG compliance refers to the understanding of the ESG guidelines mandated by countries, regulatory bodies, and frameworks, and the act of implementing them in internal policies and practices.”

Please complete our online enquiry form and we will arrange for one of our consultants to call you to discuss your requirements. They will then be able to determine what level you need to be looking at.

We can help your business to achieve this by carrying out a waste audit.

We also provide a Zero Waste to Landfill certification service, which involves a waste audit and is underpinned by our Rio sustainability platform – waste tracking software.

Both are ways to measure environmental impacts. Carbon footprinting tells you the carbon impact your product has throughout its life cycle. The process measures the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) caused by your product or organisation on the Earth’s climate but only focuses on its contribution to global warming potential.

Life cycle assessments (LCA) typically also measure the carbon footprint but they also cover a much broader range of environmental impacts caused by your product or organisation by considering over 15 impact categories that potentially affect human health, ecosystems, and the Earth’s resources.

An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is an independently verified document of a product or service’s environmental performance throughout its lifecycle and is primarily used to communicate environmental information between businesses. However, environmentally focused consumers may refer to EPDs to help them make informed decisions when choosing which products or services to buy. Before an EPD is developed, an LCA needs to be conducted

Valpak’s team of dedicated environmental consultants offer a flexible approach to delivering EPDs, taking clients seamlessly through the entire EPD journey from project inception, goal and scope definition, data collection, and environmental impact modelling (LCA), to verification and publication of an EPD.

The European Commission:

“…proposes to raise the EU’s ambition on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to at least 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. This is a substantial increase compared to the existing target upwards from the previous target of at least 40%.”

The EU’s long-term strategy is to:

“…[aim] to be climate-neutral by 2050 – an economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. This objective is at the heart of the European Green Deal  and in line with the EU’s commitment to global climate action under the Paris Agreement.”

All businesses will need to play their part to ensure the target is met by analysing the impacts of products and services and taking reasonable steps to make positive changes to reduce the impacts.

We offer a range of services to help investigate your business’s environmental impacts.