March 18, 2024
Our Love Sustainability Journey 2023 Highlights
In 2022, we launched our Love Sustainability Journey, setting out our commitments to becoming as sustainable as possible while supporting the businesses we work with to achieve their sustainability goals with education, tools, and products. Since then, we’ve made significant strides on our Journey, both in improving the sustainability of our operations and in helping others to do the same. Here are our 2023 highlights from around the world.
How the global Newell sites are stepping up to the Love Sustainability Journey
As well as designing and creating increasingly products to help our customers reduce their environmental footprint, we have been making the spaces we work in more sustainable and improving the operations at our sites.
An ambitious project at Fradley Park, our UK HQ, saw us install 1,650 solar panels on the roof, allowing the site to be energy self-sufficient during daylight hours. Another new feature at Fradley is the Woodland Walk, a biodiversity sanctuary built by the Newell staff to repurpose disused land and create a natural space amongst the industrial landscape. This mini nature reserve is now home to over 100,000 bees and a wildflower meadow of over 2,000 organic bulbs, while repurposed warehouse pallets have been made into an insect hotel.
Year-on-year (2022-2021), Fradley Park has also seen:
- Sorting for recycling volume grown by 45% to 404 tonnes
- Electricity usage declined 15% thanks to LED lighting installed throughout and solar panel installation
- Gas usage decreased by 41% thanks to the installation of high efficiency, low threshold NOX gas efficient boilers
- CO2 emissions reduced by 36%, a dramatic drop due thanks to replacing coal in our energy supply with renewable energy
Across the pond at our manufacturing facility in Winchester, Virginia, our US colleagues have made great progress towards achieving one of Newell Brands' key targets: to divert 90% of landfill bound waste to other channels. The team diverted 70 truckloads of waste – including metal items such as rivets and cans, and plastic film - away from landfill and even used recaptured waste oil to run their heating system, reducing resource and costs.
Meanwhile, in Australia, a series of Slim Jim® Recycling Stations were installed at the Newell offices in Sydney and Melbourne to boost recycling and sustainability. What’s more, cleaning teams at the sites are also using microfibre cloths, in order to reduce waste associated with disposable cloths.
Driving change through education
After carrying out our Love Recycling research projects, we identified that many businesses across the world want to do more when it comes to commercial recycling, but with a lack of solid information and data, it can be a challenge for professionals to know where to start. Enter our Love to Learn platform, a free-to-access hub packed with training modules, tools and other educational content.
Education as a tool for change is something that our team in Latin America have also made progress with. In Colombia, our colleagues have been raising awareness of recycling through a partnership with one of the largest convention centres in the country, talking to thousands of people and even delivering direct training. In Mexico, a robust training programme focused on sustainability was developed, thanks to an alliance with management consultancy firm Technology for Impact. Over 18 months, six modules were carried out, raising awareness of sustainability among our primary and secondary sales forces.
Customer success
After upgrading to RCP cleaning tools, Sanctuary Supported Living, a UK-based care organisation, reported saving 400 kilograms of mop heads from going to landfill as well as approximately 180,000 litres of water and hundreds of pounds in electricity costs. These impressive results go some way to not only improving the business’ sustainability credentials but has also helped them cut costs. In addition to better cleaning and lower environmental impacts, the ergonomically designed solutions have also created better working conditions for staff.
In Latin America we have expanded our presence in both waste and recycling and hand hygiene. In Colombia, developing significant partnerships with concert arenas, implementing multi-stream recycling systems to support sustainability goals and helping them to reduce costs. In Mexico, installing 112 sealed refill hand hygiene dispensers in a baseball stadium in order to reduce constant purchasing and supporting sustainability.
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far but every year we’re looking for ways to improve. From our operations to our facilities, we will continue to do everything we can to reduce our own environmental impact while helping other businesses to do the same. Read more about our Love Sustainability Journey and find out more about our 2023 highlights here.
