How Greenwood Plants are leading the way to a peat-free future
Greenwood Plants is a wholesale plant nursery which specialises in landscape supply to the new build property, commercial, and infrastructure sectors. After joining the team last year, Melanie Asker, Managing Director, and Ellie Coutts, Marketing Manager, were looking to really home-in on the company’s sustainability piece and have already made several commitments to reduce their carbon footprint.
However, to take their sustainability journey to the next level and work towards becoming peat free, Greenwood Plants needed a helping hand. Positive Planet recently sat down with Ellie to find out more about the progress Greenwood Plants has made with its sustainability agenda so far.
The Challenge
Sustainability has been embedded in Greenwood Plants’ values as the business has grown and developed, but the Company needed specialist help to understand its carbon footprint. The Greenwood Plants team were faced with the common challenges of where to start, what data to measure, and what its calculations meant for the business. Without this baseline measurement and understanding, measuring its carbon impact improvements accurately would have been a struggle.
Additionally, Greenwood’s commitment to achieving peat-free status accelerated its need to accurately understand its carbon footprint measurement, and realise the full extent of the impact of using peat.
The Positive Planet Solution
As Greenwood Plants has a strong focus on Corporate & Social Responsibility, engaging with a sustainability consultancy to help it achieve its goals was a no-brainer. After a quick online search and research around the business, Melanie approached the Positive Planet team for a full carbon footprint measurement and reduction plan.
Positive Planet’s straightforward process and expertise in sustainability made it a simple journey for Melanie and her team. Positive Planet was able to give Greenwood Plants a physical figure relating to its carbon footprint, along with setting a clear carbon reduction plan. With multiple sustainability initiatives already in place at Greenwood Plants, the measurement figure has the potential to raise awareness of the impact of its in-house reduction techniques as well as acting as a baseline to compare with all future measurements.
“The carbon footprint calculations and report that Positive Planet provided has galvanised our commitment to achieving carbon neutral status. We are determined to demonstrate that it is not enough to simply grow plants – we need to take action as an industry to use sustainable resources and reduce waste to collectively improve our carbon emissions.”
Melanie Asker, Managing Director, Greenwood Plants
The Benefits
Melanie engaged with the Positive Planet team after noticing a knowledge gap within Greenwood Plants around carbon footprint measurement and reduction. The added expertise around the topic has enhanced internal education on carbon-emitting hotspots around the business. For the Greenwood Plants team, this has accelerated their commitment to becoming one of the largest nurseries to achieve peat-free status, adding to existing momentum created by the team.
For Greenwood Plants, being transparent with the full team throughout their measurement and reduction journey with Positive Planet has proved beneficial, too. The inclusion of the wider team in its sustainable activities has created a sense of purpose amongst employees that reducing the organisational impact is everyone’s responsibility, boosting productivity in their carbon reduction activities.
Greenwood Plants has wasted no time in getting on with its reduction methods. Its carbon reduction plan has enabled them to introduce new sustainable practices, replacing single-use plastics for reusable netting during delivery, minimising wood purchases, and installing electric vehicle charging points on site.
Next Steps
For Greenwood Plants, the future is green. With targets already in place including a complete switch to electric vehicles at its HQ, Fresh Acres nursery, and its G cycle waste reduction scheme.
Greenwood Plants continue to take their water conservation activities to the next level by becoming completely self-sufficient in natural water usage and exploring the possibilities of introducing solar panels onsite to accelerate the transition to renewable energy.
