Where the environment is concerned, North Star believes it is time to make a change and have committed to doing their bit for the environment within their strategic plan.
Putting the plan into action North Star has formed the ‘Time to Act’ group, made up of 13 staff from across the business tasked with generating and implementing ideas to reduce North Star’s impact on the environment. The group are covering a range of areas including:
- Green Travel
- Waste and recycling
- Building for the future
- Procurement
- Energy Efficiency
A quick win achieved by the group is the ‘Green Pledge’ – a commitment to raising consciousness of the environmental impacts of everyday actions. Everyone signing up to the pledge receives a reusable drinks bottle to help reduce the amount of plastic waste being produced in the business.
The ‘Time to Act’ group have also started a carbon footprint exercise to calculate the amount of carbon produced commuting to and from work. Not including work based miles 124.1 tonnes of carbon are generated in a year. To illustrate this, offsetting these emissions would require the planting of 500 trees. With this in mind, North Star:
- Is reviewing its green travel policy to ensure it continues to incentives more fuel efficient vehicles,
- Is installing electric vehicle charge stations at their office;
- Has secured discounted travel on public transport for staff and tenants,
- Is and promoting cycling to work with the bike to work scheme and installation of secure cycle storage on the way.
- Is expanding the carbon foot print exercise to cover other journeys and business activity.
- Is reviewing carbon offsetting schemes.
One of the most intriguing ‘quick wins’ is the ‘worm farm’, a hidden stack of trays outside the office which will turn food waste produced in the office into compost for use across North Star’s housing schemes. The farm is home to voracious tiger worms which can eat up to 4KG of food waste a week and produce a rich compost as a bi-product.
North Star are committing time and resources to ensure the environmental impact of its work is reduced as far as possible.
