Edie Sustainability Leaders Forum

Daniela Eigner, Churchill’s environmental sustainability manager, recently spoke at Edie’s Sustainability Leaders Forum. The forum was focused on how businesses can make 2021 a super year for climate action. Daniela shared Churchill’s ongoing push for sustainable action and how we are working with partners to achieve this.

Our partnerships

Action for sustainability can be incorporated into the fundamental running of an office day-to-day, from using eco-friendly cleaning products, to investing in circular processes for waste. But for Churchill, a vital part of creating sustainable action is reaching beyond this, working with others to create large-scale change. Huge amounts of waste and pollution are created in supply chains. Churchill works with supply chain partners to reduce waste by driving product innovation.

In 2019, Churchill created its Sustainability Charter: “…to build strong, long-lasting relationships with our suppliers […], drive positive actions with all clients and stakeholders we work with and share the best practices we identify. […] underpinned by the Churchill Group core values – Always do right, Always seek better and Always put people first.”

Providing excellence 

Close partnerships are important as they allow us to work with others to try new things and to innovate within our service delivery. With concerns over ventilation due to the pandemic, we have been looking at air purifiers. A study carried out by our partner phs has shown that 68% of consumers are concerned about catching Covid-19 in indoor environments. With the return to the workplace approaching, it is vital that employers do all they can to keep staff safe and reassure them. We spend 90% of our time indoors so clean air is vitally important, even outside of a global pandemic, to keep us and our environment healthy.

We work closely with hygiene specialists, phs, and our two organisations share closely aligned values. We have formed an intentional partnership through which we can drive positive environmental change.

We wanted to get an understanding of how our colleagues could work more effectively alongside their products when servicing buildings, what our clients experience using them, and what best to recommend. phs installed air purifiers at two of our sites so we could experience them for ourselves.

We tested air particulates before and after installing the purifiers and saw dramatic improvements, including a 93% reduction in particulate contamination in one of our washrooms. The Aeramax filter includes sensors that can monitor a room’s occupancy, allowing it to automatically adjust to reduce energy consumption and optimise performance.

Furthermore, sites serviced by phs will see more than 95% of hygiene waste go to an energy from waste facility instead of landfill.

Having tried and tested this equipment, we can confidently promote it to our clients.

We will continue to drive positive change in an evidence-based way and our next step is our water saving campaign, which has already started delivering some great results.

A year for moving forward

The COP26 climate conference will take place in Glasgow this November, bringing more attention to sustainability after a year where our focus has been on the pandemic. This is a great opportunity to increase momentum for positive change. Alongside this, the pandemic has changed the way we see the workplace. It is no longer essential that we are all in one place. Work is no longer “where you go, but what you do”. This means that employee experience is more important than ever to draw people back into the workplace.

From an environmental perspective, we’ll be encouraging smart work and travel. This can be done by providing people with the virtual tools where it is not necessary to travel, and through schemes that encourage the use of sustainable transport.

Creating clean, healthy environments will be vital in the workplace of the coming years.