Our News

Image credit: Ecosurety

We’re thrilled to announce market-leading, B Corp-certified packaging compliance scheme Ecosurety as the headline sponsor for the 2024 Carbon Literate Organisation (CLO) Awards!

This generous support demonstrates Ecosurety’s unwavering commitment to Carbon Literacy® and collaboration towards a zero-carbon future.

What are the CLO Awards?

Now in its fifth year, the CLO Awards will celebrate and honour the record-breaking number of organisations from across the UK and worldwide which have achieved CLO accreditation throughout the past year.

A Carbon Literate Organisation (CLO) is an organisation that has been accredited as being “culturally Carbon Literate”; having certified a substantial proportion of its workforce as Carbon Literate and engaged its stakeholders and wider community in action to cut carbon emissions. The four tiers of CLO accreditation – Bronze, Silver, Gold, & Platinum – reflect increasing levels of Carbon Literacy commitment and achievement.

The CLO Awards recognise the exceptional efforts made by the now 247 (and climbing!) accredited CLOs to educate and engage their workforce and stakeholders about climate change, its impact and solutions, including practical steps employees can take to reduce organisational carbon emissions.

Ecosurety’s Carbon Literacy journey

Ecosurety is not just ‘talking-the-talk’ by sponsoring the CLO Awards but is truly ‘walking-the-walk’. The company will itself be recognised as a Silver CLO at the ceremony.

Ecosurety’s journey to Silver CLO begun in early 2022 when Marketing Projects Specialist Ben Luger used his company volunteering allowance to help certify Carbon Literacy learners. This required Ben to complete Carbon Literacy training himself, and his resulting pledges included promoting Carbon Literacy within Ecosurety to help increase understanding of their carbon impact, and to explore as a company how they could engage their member base too.

By late 2022 a further eight members of the Ecosurety team had completed Carbon Literacy training, including the CEO, Partnerships Director, Marketing and Sustainability Manager and Operations Manager. This directly resulted in a commitment to develop a new sector-specific Carbon Literacy course tailored to their core member and supplier base – the UK packaging sector. This new course was completed and accredited in 2023 with the assistance of consultancy Lighthouse Sustainability, who also trained four members of the Ecosurety team to deliver the course themselves.

By early 2024 over 50% of their team had completed the training, with high engagement throughout. As a result, a wide range of actions have been taken to cut carbon across Ecosurety’s operations, including ensuring carbon is considered at a board level, expanding carbon data and analytics expertise, reducing the carbon impact of data services, and scoping the carbon impact of new and existing suppliers. The latter was part of the group action pledge made by Head of Procurement, Nigel Ransom. He also pledged to host a series of workshops to bring industry members together to map the ESG footprint of the recycling industry by material, in order to support the sharing of best practice and identify collective actions to reduce ESG impact.

Ecosurety has now gone on to provide Carbon Literacy training to its extensive packaging producer members and recycling suppliers. Launched as part of the Carbon Literacy Action Day in November last year, representatives from over 20 external organisations have already been trained. Through Carbon Literacy, members are empowered to not only consider the impact of their packaging beyond recyclability and compliance costs, but leverage data about their packaging to make informed decisions. Senior Packaging Developer – Sustainability at Mars Petcare, Georgina Hatton, made the following pledge as a result of the training:

“As part of my role in developing sustainable packaging, I will make sure I am very clear on climate impacts of packaging and bring transparency to the business when assessing materials and formats for products. This will include educating myself in associated GhG emissions, water and land usage and understanding end of life in different regions and markets we sell in. I also pledge to work more proactively with colleagues outside of my function of R&D to work with others towards our common goal to reduce virgin plastic and develop circular packaging.”

Training its suppliers also helps Ecosurety tackle its indirect scope 3 emissions, accounting for 97.7% of total emissions.

From CLO to Partner

By sponsoring the 2024 CLO Awards, Ecosurety is taking its commitment to driving Carbon Literacy beyond the packaging sector. In doing so, they hope to highlight the crucial role that a whole host of organisations – from councils to museums, rural estates to housing associations, SMEs to government bodies – play in delivering decarbonisation within their own industries.

We are now proud to recognise Ecosurety as a Silver Partner under our Partner Scheme. This partnership strengthens progress towards our shared mission for a Carbon Literate society and a zero-carbon future for all.

Talking about the partnership, Ecosurety CEO, Will Ghali, commented:
“We must all play our part in reducing the carbon impacts that drive the climate crisis, and it is our decision-making as an organisation that can have the biggest impact. That is why Ecosurety has rapidly embraced Carbon Literacy within our own organisation. It is why we have developed our own bespoke training for the packaging sector, which we deliver to leading UK and global producers. And it is why we are proud to sponsor the 2024 Carbon Literate Organisation Awards, to champion the organisations who are empowering their teams and reducing their impact via Carbon Literacy too. Together we can accelerate change towards an environmentally sustainable world.”

Phil Korbel, Co-founder and Director of Advocacy at The Carbon Literacy Project, commented:
“Having Ecosurety’s name allied so strongly to the Carbon Literate Organisation Awards headlines a great story. Their partnership with us exemplifies how a company already leading in the sustainability field can use Carbon Literacy to up its game even further. Being able to optimise every staff member’s contribution to tackling the climate crisis is what we’re all about, and being able to use that capacity to drive better performance in their stakeholder networks is great to see.”

When are the CLO Awards?

The 2024 Carbon Literate Organisation Awards will take place on 13th June in Manchester. The event will bring together representatives from organisations across a vast range of sectors to celebrate achievements, share best practice, and inspire further action in the drive to decarbonise society in the UK and beyond.