What is the West Midlands Net Zero Pledge and why is it important?
The West Midlands Net Zero pledge is an initiative to support efforts in the West Midlands to become a net zero carbon economy by 2041. This is the regional goal, which is a subsection of the UK wide ‘Pledge to Net Zero’ which aims to meet this target by 2050. The pledge asks businesses to consider what they can do to reduce the impact their organisation makes on the environment. Recent research by LLoyds Bank has found that many small businesses are unaware of the Net Zero Pledge and don’t have any current plans to commit to it. Therefore as an SME we believe it is important to do our bit in working on sustainability and encouraging other SMEs to do so as well.
Why did we decide to join?
We believe in many ways we live the pledge already, privately and even as a business and therefore joining was a clear next step. It will be an interesting journey finding out what the service industry can do in becoming Net Zero. For small service industry businesses, such as recruitment, it is often harder to see how the Net Zero Pledge can be achieved because there aren’t major operations such as manufacturing, particularly for our business as there are only two employees and work is remote. Therefore we have more personal pledges that we hope to put in place individually, as essentially we are our business.
What we are planning to do to meet the pledge:
We have a number of personal pledges such as: sustainable living; growing and eating home grown; appreciating the small things; limiting packaging; not buying new/so reusing; repurposing etc; learning to ride a bike for short trips; treating everyone as I would like to be treated; community living and action; being the best humans we can be! We would be also interested to get some data on the energy use of emails. And eventually I’d like us to have something in our signature to the tune of “we will only send emails when necessary and only copy people when needed”. To encourage a culture change for energy’s and people’s sake.
This is only the beginning for us and we look forward to sharing our activities and contributions as we continue to work towards meeting the Net Zero Pledge!