Celebrating World Environment Day

With everything that’s going on at the moment, it was World Environment Day yesterday! So, for the first time, we hosted our member discussion forum to help celebrate and enabled our members to influence our Society’s environmental agenda.  Premiering our World Environment Day video on YouTube, it was the first time we facilitated a digital member discussion through the platform.

Launched by our Society’s Co-operative Social Responsibility Manager, Mike Pickering, the forum provided a number of updates on what we are doing to defend the environment.

“Did you know, our Society is now recycling 99% of the waste produced across our businesses and last year we reduced energy usage across our sites by 3% compared to the previous year?”

Led through our 1 Change campaign we have enabled over 1000 member pledges to tackle single-use plastic and have replaced single-use plastic carrier bags with compostable bags in over 100 Food Stores, reducing over 3 million plastic bags per year.

Supporting the cause was Anastasia Roussou, Business in the Community’s Senior Manager for Strategy and Product Innovation. Business in the Community is the oldest and largest business-led membership organisation dedicated to responsible business, and we have worked with them for a number of years to share best practice and benchmark ourselves against other organisations around responsible business practice. Anastasia highlighted the global issues associated with climate change and advocated our Co-op Midcounties’ performance in their annual responsible business tracker, highlighting that we exceeded the average in our sector and overall compared to other businesses.

Within our trading areas, we also showcased Co-op Community Energy, who focus on supporting community renewable energy projects around the UK, offering customers a 100% community-generated renewable power tariff. Helping to increase the amount of renewable energy in the UK as well as making a real difference in communities.

To inspire our members to take action our Environmental Ambassador, Cal Major, provided some great ideas on what we can all do together to help protect our planet.  We have been working with Cal for over a year now and this has included community tidy ups and school education sessions around tackling single-use plastics. If you would like to know more from Cal, see here.

Already we have had over 100 views of our video and 38 suggestions so far. Now members are being encouraged to provide us with the 1 Change they would like us to make to further defend the environment. From here our Environmental Steering Group will review all feedback and select opportunities for us to implement into our business operations where possible.

The campaign is live until the 19^th of June, so you still have time to provide us with your feedback on the 1 Change you would like us to make to further defend the environment.  Interested? Watch our video here and subscribe to our YouTube channel.