The global challenges of climate change, mass consumption of energy and resources and pollution mean that it has never been more important for all businesses to take positive action to operate in a way that is respectful of the environment.
At Nicklin, we have placed sustainability at the very heart of our business and committed to a wide range of initiatives and targets to ensure that we are not only minimising our own impact on the planet but also working with our customers to support them on their own environmental journey.
While responsibly sourced timber remains the most sustainable option for pallets and packaging (and we only source raw materials that are certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification), we are taking significant steps to lower the carbon emissions from our own business activities with the eventual goal of eradicating them all together.
Embracing the circular economy
At Nicklin we have aligned our business with model with the UK Government’s ‘Resources and Waste Strategy’ that seeks to move away the current economic model of ‘take, make, use and throw’ and move towards an approach where resources are in use for longer so that the maximum value can be extracted from them. We utilise design to optimise the amount of material used, eliminate waste and pollution whilst ensuring greater re-use and recyclability.
We have recently invested £1.1m in a new biomass plant, in which we will consume all the timber waste we produce – circa 600 tonnes – turning it into energy to power our kilns and heat our factories and offices.
This investment will remove 100% of the CO2 produced by the vehicles that would normally transport waste from our site – around 4,000kg of CO2 – while ensuring that none of our timber waste is destined for landfill.
Increasingly we are looking to work with our customers to help them sustainably manage their own waste, providing a timber waste collection service for our customers so that their own timber waste is not being transported to landfill but is instead collected and repurposed as biomass fuel.
We are also encouraging our customers to return damaged pallets where practical so that they that can either be repaired and reused, sold on into the used pallet market or used as biomass fuel.
Future targets
We have already made fantastic strides in our journey towards becoming a more sustainable business, but our ambition is to eventually become a business that is providing a net benefit to the environment.
In 2018 we introduced a fleet of electric forklift trucks at our manufacturing hub in Wednesbury and we have committed to ensuring that all our company vehicles will be fossil fuel free by 2026.
While our products are all timber based, plastic is still used by us and our customers in some packaging solutions and so we will be working with all of our customers to reduce plastic usage by 10% every year.
The introduction of our new biomass plant will have a huge impact on the amount of waste to landfill that we generate, and we are also introducing compactors on site for waste to reduce the amount of space it takes up, further reducing the number of journeys needed to remove from the site.
Through all of these initiatives we believe we can become a carbon neutral business by 2024 – which means that any CO2 released into the atmosphere from our business activities is balanced by an equivalent amount being removed.
However, we believe that as a business we should be even more ambitious and that is why we are committing to net zero emissions by 2028, which means that no emissions are created across our own operations or in our supply chain, reinforcing our desire to only work with suppliers who are committed to being environmentally positive.
Nicklin has an incredibly proud history, and this pride stems not just from the service that we are able to provide today, but also the legacy that we leave for tomorrow.
In our view, it is not possible to have one without the other.
