ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT POLICY
Not just carbon neutral, carbon negative
Our steps to manage environmental impact
Detail on how we end up carbon negative
2023 marks 30 years of our owner’s experience in providing workplace audiometry
‘Local’ is not a synonym for ‘low environmental impact’ and although we work nationally, we are a great choice for companies looking to minimise their environmental impact, indeed we are a rather marvellous choice if we say so ourselves.
Before becoming a noise-nerd, our owner, Director and fearless leader was an environment nerd from back in the days when the main worries were running out of oil by 1997 and the looming mini ice age. He even has a combined degree in biology along with all things green and climate changey. When The Noise Chap was created it was done in such a way as to minimise consumption of resources right from the very beginning, with an eye on the true environmental impact a business has.
No office - a huge environmental impact
The biggest environmental impact of any services company is not its fleet of road vehicles but is the office used to support the business. Like some kind of modern-day mystic savants, when the company was being set up in the years before Covid was even a spark in its mum’s eye, we created the business to operate with no physical office at all. The carbon saving of that is huge as no amount of off-setting is going to compensate for the actual construction, maintenance, furnishing and daily use of an office building.
This covers not only the electricity and gas consumption inherent in heating, powering, lighting, etc the building, but also the fact no CO2 was created in building an office in the first place - no cement, no quarrying, no resource consumption at all which is a huge impact of any office building. We also therefore have no requirement for employees to drive, or bus or train, to a central point, again lessening our impact. We have no need for resource consumption in terms of office furniture, IT, carpets, cleaning, telephones, etc. and no resource consumption for heating or lighting. Our entire business has been constructed to use the very latest technologies meaning we have no need for a physical office with everything being done from wherever we happen to be.
This makes us hugely efficient and eliminates what is by far the largest environmental impact of any business.
Minimal resource consumption
As we have no physical product, we tread very lightly when it comes to consumption of resources. Aside from fuel for the vans, our next most significant purchase is a small amount of paper. How small is ‘small’ I hear you ask? Very, we use around five boxes of paper a year.
Efficient vehicles and travel planning
We have eliminated the biggest environmental impacts by getting rid of the office and having very little in terms of physical resource consumption, which leaves us with the vans as our remaining impact. We control this a few ways:
Our vans are chosen to be a balance of both efficiency and long-life. There is no point having a really efficient van if it needs to be binned and replaced after 150,000 miles as the environmental costs of replacing an entire van will outweigh any interim benefits from a small increase in fuel efficiency. We choose vans which offer a good balance of fuel economy and long-life, meaning they sip gently at fuel while going on and on and on, eliminating the need for replacements. And they all meet the latest Euro6 efficiency standards.
Our vans are as ‘clean’ as possible for long-distance vans and as such are exempt from charges in city Clean Air Zones.
We plan work to minimise travel. People often ask ‘where are you based’, but the audiometry units leave on a Monday and come back on a Friday meaning more than likely we are not coming from wherever the unit is based at the weekend.
We group work geographically so we are doing multiple jobs in the same area. For example at the time of writing this, last week was in the south so we did a route of Oxford to Reading to Portsmouth to Bristol. This week is Scotland so to Carlisle to Livingstone to Stirling and to Aberdeen. On their own the travel impact would be large, but as jobs are grouped regionally the travel element of each is very much reduced.
No hazardous chemicals
We do not use or produce any harmful chemicals. We use none in the delivery of our services and our only chemical use is cleaning materials for the vans. For that, we do not use anything with a hazard warning on it ensuring nothing is used which has the potential to be harmful to the environment, or people for that matter.
Reusable bottles and pumps
Our largest chemical product used as part of the service, by volume, is the viricidal disinfectant used for sanitising headphones, buttons, surfaces, etc. within the vans. The one we use is certified as effective against viruses, including the dreaded ‘rona.
We also reuse the pump element of the hand sanitiser used by the Technician. We use an exceedingly good surgical-grade sanitiser but this is not available in bulk yet so has to be bought in smaller bottles. However, we purchase replacements which have a simple cap rather than a more elaborate pump. We then keep the pump element and reuse it on the new bottle which eliminates this as a waste product.
Biodegradable wipes
Cleansing wipes are an important part of our business with respect to cleaning of headphones and controlling infection risks. To do this we have switched to 100% biodegradable wipes which have no plastic elements.
Plastics
The only single-use disposable plastics we have are the small specula for the otoscope which are the bits that actually go into the ear when having a look at them.
Currently the only options for these are plastic disposables or metal reusables but they are only reusable in large organisations such as the NHS which have on-site sterilising autoclaves.
A simple wipe with an alcohol or antibacterial cleaner is not sufficient to clean these between separate individuals and the infection risks become too high if that is done. Put it this way, no way is anybody putting something down our own ears which ten minutes previously was coated in someone else’s ear wax, no matter how well it has been wiped! That’s just grim.
As soon as cardboard / degradable alternatives are available we will be the first to use them, and we have contacted the otoscope manufacturer to enquire when or if these will be introduced.
Offsetting and managed woodland
We operate our own off-setting scheme. Paying someone else as part of an offsetting scheme is a bit of a fudge and, shhhh, say it quietly but is often not all that effective. So rather than paying someone to plant trees on our behalf, we took on the exclusive lease of around five acres of land which we plant and maintain.
This contains about three acres of semi-mature trees, about 1.25 acres of completely mature woodland, and about 0.75 acres containing newly-planted saplings. The newly-planted woodland is mixed to avoid monoculture problems.
This is a total of approximately 410 semi-mature trees, 50 fully mature trees and 180 newly planted trees, a conservative total of around 640 trees under our management.
Carbon Calculation
Our Carbon Footprint calculation for Jan 2022 to Jan 2023 was 14.7 tonnes of CO2. The standard assumption of CO2 absorption by a tree is 167kg/year. The trees we manage therefore absorb around 88.5 tonnes of CO2 per year. Some of the younger ones will absorb less, but as the calculation shows us absorbing six times more CO2 than we produce, we can confidently prove the woodland we manage exceeds the CO2 produced by the business, by a large margin.
Link: Our footprint calculation
The new trees
The 180 newly-planted trees are a mix of:
Oak
Cherry
Lime
Aspen
Alder
Hazel
Hawthorn
Apple
Pear
Rowan
As well as the trees, the woodland has many wild deer visiting it daily, along with foxes, snakes, hedgehogs, squirrels, a rather fat badger who keeps digging under the fencing, and even eels in the stream, (which we also manage and have created slow pools to encourage wildlife).
