Jul’10 Two Wheels Are Better Than Four!
With the obvious health benefits cycling to work is great for your heart and for your wallet. We’ve teamed up with Cycle Solutions who are the fun people behind the Cycle to Work scheme. This week the Cycle to Work Roadshow turned up to show off a few demonstration bikes. You can save up to 50% off new bikes and it’s a great way to get to work and avoid the rush hour traffic….just mind those pot holes!
Pictured is Russell, Andy and Jay who run our I.T department here at the brewery.
May ‘10 The Biffa Boxes Are Here:
We’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of our recycling boxes and Michelle has been busy prepairing each of them before they’re distributed across our brewery. The new boxes are a big step forward as previously we could only recycle paper and card. Small steps big difference!
March ‘10 Back To School
W e’ve teamed up with the guys at Biffa Waste Solutions to really make a difference on our approach to recycling here at the brewery. We realised that nearly 90 % of our waste was going to landfill and this needed addressing quickly which is why we called in the experts.
This month every employee here at Everards was invited to attend a special recycling session which discussed a new waste solution that will be introduced in the next few weeks. Claire and Jane from Biffa explained how Everards could reduce landfill waste from 90% to 30% by using their recycling scheme.
Each office will be given a red box and a blue box to separate our waste from paper, plastics, cardboard and even food waste. The boxes are collected every week and we now send only 30% of our domestic office waste to landfill but our target is o% so there’s plenty more work to do.
We’ve just put the finishing touches to an upgraded lighting system in the brewery. It’s part of our energy saving initiative and involved replacing existing lighting and lighting controls to minimise energy wastage.
As well as reducing our carbon footprint we’ve also improved visibility in the warehouse area of the brewery and of course there have been substantial cost savings. The updated system extends the life of our lights from two years to six years and it will also reduce the cost of lamp disposal in compliance with the WEEE Directive Read more “here”:http://www.epaonthenet.net/article.aspx?ArticleID=30760.
We’ve just started a project which involves replacing the refrigeration plant in our brewery and this month we took delivery of two new refrigeration units. Crane Day (as we called it) involved using a mammoth crane to hoist the new units into place. The new units mean that as well as being legally comliant, they’re also cheaper and easier to maintain whilst at the same time improving our energy efficiency here at the brewery.
After considerable work with our suppliers, Steve ( He’s our Health and Safety and Green Credentials Campaigner) and his team have managed to get our gas consumption figures sent wirelessly from one end of the site to the other, so now we’ve got up to the minute gas monitoring as well as electricity monitoring. This means we can really see what has an effect on our gas consumption and how altering our working practices can change it. Good work from the engineers!
To raise awareness of our commitment to the environment we organised an ‘Environmental Week’, where everybody was asked to keep a close eye on how they were using energy. We’ve had an energy saving/awareness poster and sticker campaign, active monitoring and policing of lighting and brewing trials with a reduced boil time. All these measures really added up and we actually saved 3,423kWh off an average week. We’re not stopping now – The poster and sticker campaign remains in place and we’re continuing to look at our boil times.
The information from our energy sensors is giving us some great information. Steve Brassington (our engineering manager) found one of our air compressors wasn’t too efficient and was running longer than it was really needed. After researching alternatives, Steve secured funding to replace this compressor back in September and now it’s in and running we’re using 40% less energy to generate compressed air than our old one, so we’re well pleased with Steve.
We’re really keen on making Everards as environmentally friendly as possible but we’re not the experts which is why we’ve found somebody who is and asked for their guidance and advice to help us become greener.
Dr Emma Fieldhouse is the environmental manager at the University of Leicester and has agreed to sit in on our steering group meetings to bring her experience from making the University of Leicester a greener place to our group. You can read about what Emma does at http://www2.le.ac.uk/Members/ejf13
We’ve been looking at all sorts of gadgets to help us be more environmentally friendly at work but perhaps education could be the real key. By letting everybody know how much energy a computer or printer uses if it’s left on overnight and how much it costs then perhaps people might turn them off. Our environmental volunteers are spreading the green word around in every department and team to encourage colleagues to switch off at the end of the day.
