Blue Rock has signed up with Carbon Neutral Britain to help the software supplier reduce its existing emissions and offset its Carbon Footprint via the Woodland Fund, enabling the company achieve Carbon Negative status.
Following the UN’s recent report on the impact of human activity on our climate, Blue Rock states that it has been looking into how it can further decrease its environmental impact, and also how it can help its customers reduce their carbon footprint. Indeed, it is a big topic within the builders’ merchant industry, for example with the Construction Leadership Council introducing ConstructZero, the Builders Merchants Federation committing to zero carbon operations, and the government’s Net Zero by 2050 10-point plan.
Carbon Negative
To go even further, Blue Rock reports it has opted to go ‘carbon negative’ instead of carbon neutral, meaning it will offset double its actual emissions of 61.48 tCO2e and remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. To help the company achieve this goal, it has signed up with Carbon Neutral Britain, which is helping it to reduce its existing emissions and offset its Carbon Footprint via the Woodland Fund.
The Carbon Neutral Britain Woodland Fund supports reforestation, deforestation prevention and woodland management projects, with a strong focus on having a positive impact on the local wildlife, ecology and biodiversity. Examples of the most recently supported projects include preventing deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest, reforestation after wildfires in Australia, as well as woodland planting in the UK.
George Troullis, Blue Rock’s Managing Director, said: “For decades, my team and I have been helping customers reduce their carbon impact through the use of our software systems. To be fair, we achieved this as a side effect of making our customers more efficient — less paperwork, less travelling, less returns and less waste by providing world class software tools to calculate recommended stock levels.
“The ‘green agenda’, historically, wasn’t the driver for this but it is now as we are a component within the construction materials industry and we have to play our part, albeit small. Not only will Blue Rock continue to innovate and bring innovation to our merchant and distribution customers to help them cut their carbon footprint but we will also play a direct part to account for our own effect on the environment.”
George continued: “Blue Rock had started to adopt electric vehicles a few years ago and will continue doing so. We produce virtually no paperwork, and any sent to us is digitised and then recycled. The majority of our team works, where possible, from home which has a dramatic effect on our use of fossil fuels and even moving our own servers into our hosting centre has had a net reduction in energy consumption and saved a considerable monthly electric bill.
“But it wasn’t enough…”
Accordingly, George explained: “Blue Rock has just been awarded a Carbon Negative status, and we believe that if our customers and industry strive for this then so should we and as a result we can reverse our impact on climate change in 2021, and many years to come.
“It is far simpler for a software house like ours to become Carbon Negative than a distributor and merchant of construction materials, but I would hope that our action would send a message to our software colleagues and competitors in this industry to do the same.”
Click here to read the company’s blog on the key environmental benefits of ERP systems.
