Exploring every opportunity
Endurance Doors is leaving no stone unturned in its pursuit of sustainability. Andrew Speakman, commercial director, explains more.
At Endurance Doors and across all of the businesses within Rocal, we continue to adopt a holistic approach to sustainability.
We know there is no silver bullet or fix-all solution that can easily resolve the different and diverse environmental issues we currently face as a society. Instead, it’s important for all of us, both as individuals and as organisations, to do what we can, where we can.
Multiple small improvements in multiple different areas can have a cumulative effective and lead to a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Carbon neutral business
Our commitment to sustainability has already seen Endurance Doors take major steps and implement significant initiatives to optimise our environmental credentials.
As a prime example, our determination to minimise our carbon footprint sees us using renewable energy across our operations – including electricity generated by solar panels installed on our own factory roof.
In addition, we carefully plan our delivery schedules to minimise mileage, fuel costs and environmental impact, and we are making increased use of electric vehicles across our fleet.
Not content to stop there, we also balance out any unavoidable carbon emissions attributable to our business through carbon offsetting and are in the process of becoming a fully and independently verified, carbon neutral organisation, certified to the highest global standards.
Plus, we are equally fastidious in our efforts to address other key environmental issues such as waste management and the non-sustainable depletion of resources.
Highlighting this, we send zero waste to landfill and make use of recycled material wherever possible.
The virgin timber used in our doors also comes from renewable, sustainably managed, and certified North European forests where four seedlings are planted for every tree harvested.
Lean – and green
At Endurance Doors, we are proud of our successes so far in reducing our environmental impact. That said, we are also acutely aware that our work in this critical area is far from over.
Our challenge now entails building on our achievements to date by driving improvements in other, perhaps less immediately obvious ways.
Reflecting this, a key focus for us at present is on lean manufacturing. By optimising our production systems and processes to ensure we only use the plant and materials we need, when we need them, we stand to boost both our commercial and environmental performance.
In fact, the sustainability benefits to lean manufacturing are abundant. They include reduced waste, resource consumption and energy demands. Plus, by reducing our requirement for resources and energy, there is a reduction in the attributable carbon emissions involved in meeting those needs.
On top of this, operating in a leaner fashion can help to increase the longevity of our production machinery. This in turn reduces the need for replacement and the associated environmental impacts of producing that new equipment, such as the requirement for further energy and raw materials.
Lean manufacturing can also contribute to easier end-of-life product recycling if it entails a product design being adjusted to use fewer parts and types of material.
A united effort
Because there are so many different ways in which an organisation can enhance its operations to improve its environmental performance, it’s important not to become blinkered.
Refinements can often be found in every area and so it should be a shared responsibility for everyone in every department to think about what opportunities exist for greater sustainability.
They should ask what can I do? What can we do as a team? And what can we do as a business?’
Initially, the answers to those questions might seem like small things.
But it’s the small things combined that ultimately make the big difference.