CARBON MANAGEMENT AT WARBURTONS
Climate change is one of the biggest risks and challenges of our generation. The potential impact on our environment of a warming planet is a threat which would affect everyone: our business and our communities, our ingredients and the products we bake.
We strive to be a net zero business, reducing our use of carbon in order to mitigate any potential impact on our climate systems.
We’re continually enhancing our capabilities by investing in new plants, machinery, vehicles, technologies and infrastructure. As both a large bakery manufacturer and fleet operator, it is really important that we act responsibly and ensure we work hard to reduce our carbon impact and our overall energy and fuel consumption.
Whilst we’ve already made some significant impacts in our energy efficiency and emissions, we know there is more to do.
We are always striving to drive energy efficiency across our business by buying better, using less, and self-generating more. We ensure that all the electricity we buy comes from zero carbon renewable sources and is certified by a Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin (REGO). Internally, our energy efficiency programmes have identified opportunities such as increased oven insulation, gas burners that shut down automatically when there are gaps in production, and the re-use of plant waste heat to hear our hot water systems.
As a result, we have already reduced our CO2 emissions by 20% over the last 10 years but we have more to do. We’re now developing our plan for the next 5-10 years to further reduce our carbon impact and meet our ambition of being net zero by 2050.
We continue to invest in renewable energy through solar and wind power, in addition to Combined Heat and Power (CHP) technology which has enabled us to reduce our bakeries electricity emissions by 56.2%.
We are proud to have begun our journey to a zero emission fleet – the first stop being 40+ electric vehicles on the road by 2027. We are already working towards this since rolling out our first 16 tonne 100% electric truck.
We have started to change our trunking fleet over to bio-CNG (compressed natural gas) which is a clean sustainable alternative to diesel. Our intention is to move our entire trunking fleet to bio-CNG over the next five years to achieve an 85% reduction in their CO2 emissions.
Through our FleetBoard telematics system, we have reduced our diesel by 11% and our carbon emissions by 4,500 tonnes of CO2e across our 800-strong direct to store distribution fleet. We use routing and scheduling software to optimise our delivery routes, which has reduced both the distance travelled and fuel used.
We plan our distribution network each day based on product availability and delivery deadlines, to ensure that we utilise as much vehicle capacity as possible.
Approximately 50% of our inter-company distribution fleet are double deck trailers, to ensure maximum load fill.
All our vehicles are specified with cruise control, engine idle cut off and exhaust brakes to minimise environmental impact.
