Abricon's ongoing support for the Bristol Green Pledgees

Bristol City Council’s Green Capital Team and the Bristol Partnership are committed to making Bristol a low carbon city. They are asking organisations throughout the city to pledge their support and reduce their environmental impact. As part of the pledge, organisations would have to agree to measure their environmental impact and report annually on what they had done to reduce it.

Bristol City Council realised that organisations may need assistance in reducing their environmental impact and asked Abricon to develop a programme of events designed to provide a supportive environment to the Pledgees.

Abricon immediately set about designing a series of half day training seminars that would demystify what ‘going green’ meant in practice and provide simple guidelines that the Pledgees could follow to allow them to reduce their impact. One of the key design principles was that any seminars would have to be spaced throughout the year to give companies the opportunity to put the advice into practice before the next seminar. Seminar topics included carbon footprinting, resource efficiency, greening the supply chain and green travel planning.

Gary Nelson, of Abricon, takes up the story. “We still felt that something was missing,” said Gary “seminars are all very well to show concepts in theory but our experience in other projects had demonstrated that on-site visits were invaluable when spotting opportunities for improvement”. Consequently, a number of Pledgees were asked if they would allow site visits from other Pledgee organisations along with an Abricon expert where good practice could be identified as well as ideas for improvement.

Abricon added to this a helpdesk for the Pledgees to call if they had questions about their carbon footprinting calculations, and a Google Group for keeping in touch with one another. We realised we had created a Club, a Carbon Reduction Club, in fact!

To date, over 60 companies have signed up as Pledgees and had the opportunity to take part in the Carbon Reduction Club.