Sustainability – our commitment
When you work with FSP, you are working with a company which is committed to operating in a sustainable way and reducing its impact on the environment.
This is not ‘greenwashing’. This is our genuine and far-reaching commitment to doing the right thing and helping our customers to green their supply chains.
It started in 2016, when we achieved ISO 14001 for our environmental management system. From there, we used the learnings from completing the ISO accreditation process to go one step further and we’ve now introduced Carbon Footprint Account Reporting (CFAR) into our business.
Carbon accounting is only mandatory for businesses much larger than ours currently, but we want to stay ahead of the curve and drive our own journey to net zero, as we continue to innovate in the development of access cover manufacturing. We quantify our Scope one and two GHG emissions through CFAR, and we are making and implementing changes to reduce our direct emissions and the emissions related to our energy use.
One way we are reducing our CO2 emissions is by generating more of the power we use onsite, using solar PV. As of 2022, we generate more than half of the power we use, thanks to 180,000 kWp of solar PV panels installed on our roof.
Our factory extension is now almost complete and by the end of the summer 2023 it will accommodate a further 35 kWp of solar panels, with the extra capacity used to power a nitrogen generation system. The precision laser cutting of steel requires nitrogen and we use a lot each week. But with the ability to generate our own nitrogen, powered by solar energy, we can reduce the carbon footprint of buying it in and having it delivered to site. We will also make nitrogen at weekends, when the solar PV energy generated isn’t being used by the factory.
We are investing in other ways to reduce our emissions too, such as replacing fleet vehicles and forklift trucks with electric alternatives. Our first electric FLT arrived last year, and it will be recharged solely using our solar PV system.
Thanks to an £8,000 grant from the Telford & Wrekin’s Climate Change Fund we have now installed two new high speed charging points for staff and members of the community to power their electric vehicles.
As a sign of our commitment to taking positive climate action we have also joined the SME Climate Hub, a non-profit global initiative that empowers small to medium sized companies to take climate action and build resilient businesses for the future. We have pledged to halve emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050.
In the last two years, FSP has grown as a business by around 20%, yet in the same period our energy bills have almost halved. We’ve invested over £0.5m in sustainability since 2019 and it’s paying dividends for us, our customers and the planet.
Please get in touch if you need any of this information as part of your own work to prove the green credentials of your products and partners.