Swiftclean – supporting the environment
The team at Swiftclean is focused more than ever on reducing its carbon footprint.
We are currently trialling electric vans in our fleet. We already have a mix of hybrid and electric vehicles and have two electric charging stations installed at our head office. We would like to change our fleet to fully hybrid/ electric; our team has been trialling various van makes and models to ensure we get the best solution for us and the environment.
As part of our commitment to the environment, our field staff fleet of vans are all fitted with Lightfoot, a fleet management and vehicle tracking tool, which has the added benefit of in-cab coaching technology, proven to deliver a reduction in fuel expenditure and therefore carbon emissions.
Since inception, we have reduced our CO2 output by over 116 tonnes, an average saving of 22 tonnes per year!
Did you know that Swiftclean holds ISO 14001 Certification for Environmental Management (EMS)? This shows that Swiftclean is a business that aims to protect the environment. ISO 14001 sets the Standard for environmental management systems and helps ensure we comply with increasingly stringent environmental laws and regulations, whilst helping us to reduce our environmental impact.
We have a calendar of events planned for the year, by our Social Committee, which always includes a social and environmental focus for the wider team. For example, we have a reverse advent calendar in December where we donate to a local food bank charity ahead of Christmas, and in June we held a litter picking week in which the team collected over 20 black sacks of rubbish from the area surrounding head office.
Our site operations do result in some waste which can be recycled – for example, some of the more obvious examples of this include plastic bottles which carry chemicals. For a long time, we have used larger bottles and decanted them into smaller, reusable bottles to minimise our waste.
When we install access doors and panels, we remove sections of sheet metal from the ducting. The leftover scraps and offcuts are considered as scrap metal, and we make sure to recycle them. We not only recycle these from the site but also from our on-site training academy.
Another efficiency we made a few years ago in our head office, is to have thermal window film fitted to all of our windows; this reduces heat penetration, to help maintain consistent indoor temperature, leading to lower energy consumption and reduced utility bills. An added benefit of this was glare reduction, creating a more comfortable environment to work in for our team.
Other environmental initiatives include:
- Having solar panels installed on our head office building a few years ago
- Upping our contributions to recycling waste on-site, including recycling plastics and glass as well as paper and cardboard which we have done for many years.
- Hosting many of our team meetings via teams rather than in person, reducing travel time and energy and reducing our carbon footprint.
- Offering our spare, unused wooden pallets out to the team for home projects – which has been really successful and some of our teams have used these to create planters at home and other garden projects!
We will continue to investigate the ways in which we can reduce our impact on the enviroment by using new techniques and equipment in our work processes.
