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Our Property Manager Laura is a bit of an Eco Geek—which helps us in striving to always be focussing on our environmental impact. Laura is going to take us through some of the work the Property team has been doing to reduce our carbon footprint.
Sustainability is something that’s really important to me, to the wider STEP team and more importantly our Tenants. We’re nearly 40 and as such we have deep roots in our surrounding communities. That’s why we care so much for our city, our rural towns, villages and communities. This means our approach to sustainability touches everything we do and spans across our suppliers, customers, communities and buildings.
Our head office, Stirling Enterprise Park is over 100 years old, built in 1890 – If you’re interested in the history of the building then you will be able to learn all about the history of Stirling Enterprise Park at our 40th birthday party next year (more information coming soon). So it’s a challenge when it comes to being a net zero building. But who doesn’t love a challenge?!
And it’s exciting when you can actually calculate and report the savings you are making. As an organisation, we are determined that sustainability plays a large part in every decision we make.
Our tenants, like other Stirling businesses, have been through a lot over the last few years with the impact of COVID taking its toll and now energy prices rising at an alarming rate. So whilst our main focus was delivering these projects was on our carbon footprint, I am over the moon with the scale of savings that our tenants will see.
Investing in tenanted units so far we have replaced 382 fluorescent lights with LED fittings., saving 39,618 KW and an average of 50 light tubes from going to landfill annually.
Since sustainability leads to profit this sees a potential saving of £16,889.75 in electric costs for STEP’s tenants, which is, on average, a 67% saving for each business.
Next, we plan to continue this work at our other locations — I can’t wait to see the final saving we can make!
But of course, we didn’t stop there, whilst looking at our tenanted units we decided to look at what changes could be made to our communal areas to make further savings and reducing more of our impact on the environment. Which led to replacing the final six fluorescent lights with LED fittings and fitting 117 light sensors. This has seen a saving of 8,344 KW and a cost saving of £9,256.86.
COVID was one of the most challenging things that I’ve ever been through in my working life but at STEP we try to see the silver lining and as such, we have calculated the environmental benefits of some of our staff working from home. Today 57% of the team now work from home roughly three days a week, this has saved 64,520 commuting miles and has reduced our carbon emissions by 18 tonnes.
Another benefit is that working from home has, in addition, saved 124,200 commuting hours for our team members who are able to work from home. We are now focussing on our venue hire offering as well as analysing our cleaning products, focussing on single-use plastics and replacing paper towels with hand-dryers post-COVID. We are looking at other single-use items across all aspects of the business and will be reporting results across all of our sites.
Myself and one of our Business Support advisers are currently completing a Sustainability course with the University of Stirling, so watch this space for future projects that will help us become a Net Zero company by 2050 and significantly reduce our carbon emissions by 2030. This includes some innovative projects such as:
· Packaging Recycle and Reuse Station
· Circular Waste Materials Model
· Tenant Electric Pool Car
To find out more about STEP’s sustainability commitment and projects visit stepscotland.co.uk/step/sustainable-step/
