Fitting out London’s finest buildings
To reach Net Zero, a company needs to remove the same amount of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as it produces. At Brown & Carroll, we have worked hard to achieve - and exceed this - in two main ways. Firstly, by significantly reducing our carbon emissions. Secondly, by taking steps to capture much more carbon than we generate.
It is much harder to achieve ‘Net Zero’ rather than ‘Carbon Neutral’ operations.
Carbon Neutral normally means a business is trying to limit future increases in carbon emissions while putting resources into offsetting them.
Achieving Net Zero is much more difficult. It requires a company to aggressively reduce carbon emissions first, only offsetting unavoidable emissions that remain.
At Brown and Carroll, we have achieved at least an 98% reduction in our carbon emissions between 2022 and 2024. This means that our offsetting measures have now turned us into a carbon negative business.
Because Brown & Carroll has an annual turnover well over the £44 million threshold, we have to undertake a mandatory assessment of energy use and energy efficiency opportunities every four years. This has to cover transport emissions as well as the energy used in our buildings and processes.
Since our baseline assessment in 2022, we have invested heavily in more sustainable/renewable methods to reduce our carbon emissions by 98%.
To further increase our sustainability and to reduce our carbon emissions, we also invest in a number of other measures and schemes. These include:
Since 2022, we have had a new waste management partnership with Veolia. In the two years this has operated at our Basildon facilities, we have saved over 21 tCO2. This is the equivalent of 8 cars off the road each year.
We have been offsetting our carbon emissions with a tree planting programme since 2012.
Since then, we have planted over 90,000 trees and saplings across Essex, London and beyond.
One tree could remove 1 tonne of carbon dioxide from the air over its lifetime. The carbon is not only stored by the tree and its roots, but also held in the surrounding soil. As trees grow, they absorb and lock in carbon emissions that would otherwise contribute to global warming.
Winrock International Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) results suggest that between 4.5 and 40 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually are removed per hectare during the first 20 years of tree growth. Based on the most conservative figures, we can calculate the carbon captured by our 90,000 trees. (162 tonnes)
