Sustainability | Our journey

At ConSpare, we pride ourselves on the continuous improvement of our business. As well as helping our customers to reduce CO2, we acknowledge the need to reduce our own carbon footprint and become as sustainable a business as possible.

Here’s a list of our current achievements and areas in which we’re looking to improve:

Energy efficiency and utilising green energy

New energy efficient premises – Moving premises from Pinxton to Castlewood has significantly reduced our energy consumption. This cutting edge, thermally efficient building is predicted to lower total annual energy consumption by 70% compared to our previous premises. It doesn’t use gas or oil for heating, using only lower carbon electricity. Smart LED lighting is used throughout, and EV chargers are available for staff.

Clean energy from solar – We have installed a 100kW photovoltaic (PV) solar array on the roof of Castlewood to power our operations. This is predicted to save 23.5 tonnes of CO2 per year, equating to 21.5% of total Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Read more here.

ConSpare’s Solar Array

Focusing on re-use and recycling

Reducing the impact of our despatches – Where possible, we use as many recycled and re-used materials as we can within our despatched packages and pallets. We also continue to explore the use of biodegradable materials where appropriate. Improvements include:

• We regularly use recycled and reused boxes, pallets and packaging material
• We use biodegradable plastic packaging “peanuts” in boxes
• Single-use plastic document wallets are no longer used
• Plastic based packing tape has been replaced with paper-based tape

Reducing consumption

Improving processes and going paperless – Improving operational efficiencies also has a significant impact on our sustainability efforts. As part of our journey to make our entire sales process digital, a large proportion of operations are now considered fully paperless. We estimate that this has saved the use of 32,000 sheets of paper per year, a reduction of 40%. This is equivalent to saving three large pine trees per year.

Using fewer single-use plastics – We look for opportunities in both our office and warehouse areas to reduce the use of single-use plastics and materials which cannot be easily recycled. Whether it be eliminating plastic cups or ensuring our branded plastic pens are produced from recycled or biodegradable materials, we look for all opportunities to make improvements.

Continuous Improvement

We have partnered with Go Climate Positive to accurately evaluate, monitor and improve the carbon footprint of our business. We now continually search for areas in which we can improve the sustainability of both ConSpare and ProSpare.