Here's what Nisbets are doing to reduce our impact on the planet
Our European teams have compiled a sustainability audit to benchmark where we are to enable us to work towards creating a sustainabiity develop plan to focus on what we will do in the future to reduce our environmental impact.
Our ESG strategy is now focused on the following 4 pillars:
Environmental Sustainability - Ethical Trading - Nisbets in the Community - Great Place to Work
Sustainable Development Goals
Aligning to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - a collection of 17 global goals designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all" - we have established an ESG committee with the aim to drive our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) activities.
Ensuring we focus on the right development areas, we carried out an exercise engaging with our customers, colleagues, local communities, suppliers, other business partners and other small businesses to understand what was important to them. This formed a Materiality Matrix which was reviewed against the business impact of these items and the interest from our stakeholders.
At the end of this review, we established our 5 key focuses:
Packaging reduction
We’re working closely with our suppliers and supply chain partner to identify opportunities to reduce and improve the sustainability of our product and delivery packaging.
In our warehouses:
- All products are carefully catalogued, measured and weighed to ensure we use correctly sized boxes. Saving on unnecessary cardboard, packaging and transport space.
- We now send over 12% of our products directly to customers with no additional packaging, reducing cardboard waste.
In our offices:
- Since 2022, our catalogues are sent out without outer plastic wrapping using the carbon neutral postal system.
In our supply chain:
- We’re working with suppliers to reduce the amount of packaging used, changing from plastic to paper or cardboard, increasing the recycled material content and removing polystyrene wherever possible. These changes have saved over 15 tonnes of plastic in 2023, the equivalent to 1.3 million plastic bottles.
Products:
- Since December 2023, the Rowlett range of toasters have had all plastic removed from their packaging for all new orders.
- Polar have removed all polystyrene from 290 refrigeration products. As of December 2023, all future orders for these products will be polystyrene free.
Energy use and climate impact
This has always been a key area of focus: reducing our costs to keep our prices low, and reducing our climate impact across our supply chain by minimising wastage and energy usage.
In our warehouses:
- In 2023 we certified for ISO 14001 Environmental Standard. This independently shows that we are fulfilling our environmental performance obligations.
- The ISO 50001 Energy Standard independently verifies continuously improving environmental performance, we achieved this certification in 2023.
- 100% of our Head office and Warehouse lighting is energy saving LED bulbs
- 100% of our energy at our Cork warehouse come from renewable sources
- At the end of 2022 we moved to our new purpose built warehouse in Cork, built to Leed Silver Standard (leadership in energy and environmental design) with EV chargers
- All our forklift trucks and Very Narrow Aisle fork lift trucks are electric powered.
- Despite record sales in 2023, our energy usage has decreased 12% year on year and has almost halved in the last 5 years.
- All our forklift trucks are electric powered. And in 2022, we replaced 13 Very Narrow Aisle forklift trucks with new Li-ion batteries that use 25% less electricity.
- Our warehouse’s uses both cardboard and plastic compactors to improve on site recycling.
- Our recycling rate is 85% with any unrecyclable waste used for energy production.
- We do not use any disposable gloves in our warehouses and all our PPE is reusable.
- All failed parts from repairs from customer machines are taken back to our warehouses for recycling.
- All failed parts from repairs from customer machines are taken back to our warehouses for recycling.
- We no longer sell Single Use Plastic product into the Irish Market
In our offices:
- We make sure only low-energy appliances are used in our buildings.
- 100% of energy for our Nisbets offices comes from renewable or green sources.
- EV chargers at our Cork site installed to support colleagues move to more sustainable transport.
- In-house cleaning in our office uses our Jantex green range of products, these are plant-based, non-toxic and non-harmful to marine and aquatic life.
- All paper marketing materials sent to customers and our retail stores are from sustainable sources.
- We have extensively marketed numerous solutions to help our customers reduce their carbon footprint. For example, our Jantex green range is kinder to both staff and the environment than traditional cleaning products. It utilises plant-based formulas that are non-toxic and not harmful to marine and aquatic life. We continue to promote, market and expand our range of Fiesta Recyclable and Compostable products, giving customers more sustainable alternatives.
- Members of Repak helping us comply with Irish and EU Packaging regulations , reducing and recycling packaging waste ensuring we are protecting the environment and reducing the environmental impact of packaging waste.
- Member of the Producer Register working with WEEE Ireland which promotes recycling of batteries , electrical and lighting equipment.
In our stores:
- All our transportation to our retail stores across the UK, Ireland and Europe is backhauled, so there are no empty trucks moving between sites.
- All pallets collected from customers and used within our business between our carriers are reused.
- We only work with transport companies who are committed to reducing their carbon footprint and have made it a key scoring metric for our tenders.
- Our logistics parcel delivery partner have a published net zero emission target by 2040. Investing in eTransits and HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) fueled lorries.
In our supply chain:
- All our transportation to our retail stores across the UK, Ireland and Europe is backhauled, so there are no empty trucks moving between sites.
- All pallets collected from customers and used within our business between our carriers are reused.
- All our vans that transport between warehouses are rated Euro 6, adhering to the latest European Commission’s emission-control standards for reducing harmful levels from nitrogen oxide (NOx), carbon monoxide and particulate matter (e.g., soot from diesel). All our forklift trucks are electric powered.
- We only work with transport companies who are committed to reducing their carbon footprint and have made it a key scoring metric for our tenders.
- Our logistics parcel delivery partner have a published net zero emission target by 2040. Investing in eTransits and HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) fueled lorries.
Customer energy saving
We know our customers have had to cope with a significant rise in energy prices and so we’ve focused on how we could help reduce their energy usage. During 2022 and 2023, a key part of our marketing and promotional campaigns has been focused on “save energy/save money” and backed up by colleague training so we can further help and advise our customers on ways to save energy. These campaigns focused on many of the innovative new products we have launched and helping educate customers, so they choose the right energy-saving appliances.
- Product training for retail and customer care teams to ensure we can help customers make an informed choice.
- Energy efficient innovative products were launched in induction products, refrigeration, pest control and water heating.
- We launched induction hobs and food warmers for our Buffalo brand. Induction cooking and the electrification of kitchens is major focus as it can save up to 70% of energy vs gas cooking.
- We introduced a range of A-rated Polar refrigeration products that have significant savings of up to 60% energy use vs older lower rated products.
- The Easyzap LED lighting-based pest control saves up to 50% of the energy of the older fluorescent bulb products. Also, the LED bulbs last twice as long reducing wastage.
- In 2023, we launched energy-saving manual fill water boilers , which are double skinned and insulated saving 60% energy vs old more basic models.
- Polar has a long history of innovation and adopted improved refrigerants 2 years before government legislation, which saved over 40% of energy.
- Ensuring that all our products comply with energy efficiency regulations.
Information security and technical resilience
With 1 million customers a year and our industry-leading website, we take this issue very seriously. The risk of disruption to our customers as well as our business is huge, which is why we continue to invest in this area to keep ahead of constant new threats.
In our head office:
- We continue to update security systems to support safer hybrid working.
- We have upgraded our IT systems (i.e., network and connectivity) and moved to Microsoft Office 365 to enable our office-based hybrid workforce to be able to safely work in the office and at home.
- We’ve also facilitated hybrid and distance working through Microsoft Teams, which would otherwise have been face-to-face meetings involving some form of travel across our warehouses, stores and offices, including foreign travel.
- We've partnered with cloud-based systems to move our backend servers to cloud-based data centres. This IT infrastructure will be using fully renewable energy by 2025 and should attain Zero Waste certification by 2030 - a move which will save us 7t CO2e per annum.
- Annual training with courses on cyber security, phishing, social engineering red flags and internet security
Product quality, reliability and repairability
This has always been a key focus for Nisbets as we know how important it is for our customers’ busy hospitality businesses to avoid the massive impact and disruption caused by products not working. We have in-house quality and compliance teams based both at our UK head offices, as well as our sourcing offices, to ensure product quality, reliability and repairability. And we work and share data with all our suppliers to focus on continuous improvement.
In our warehouse:
- As part of our zero waste-to-landfill policy and with our service division, we’re committed to repairing products wherever possible, rather than replacing them.
In our head office:
- We’re very proud of our industry-leading first-time fix rate, which saves us hundreds of thousands of miles every year in second visits to customers. Where identified, parts are sent to site before an engineer visit supporting a 75% first time fix rate.