We recognise that our footprint is your footprint and therefore have a strong desire to remove carbon from energy generation across the 22-acre site to sustainably reduce our mutual carbon footprint.
What is Carbon Footprint?
Carbon footprint is a rather polite description for pollution. We like to approach it strategically and refer to it as pollution mitigate, as carbon in our eyes sounds a bit ethereal, scientific, and remote.
A carbon negative business park
We are in a fortunate position of being a business park within a 1,000 acre Estate, this gives us the scope to absorb carbon in vast and varying ways.
Since we started on our plan to re-wood the Estate back in 1996 we have planted over 75,000 trees. Those early trees are now woods which are havens of natural capital and environmental diversity, it is our view that these trees absorb more carbon than our business park produces. As we haven’t got an academic verification, we don’t shout about it!
We may have embarked on our plan some three decades ago because we felt it was the right thing to do and to improve the landscape, but it is just a very happy coincidence that it will contribute in making Burrough Court at some stage in the future carbon negative … now wouldn’t that be a thing for you to say to your customers?!
Becoming a carbon negative business park
Efficiency is the mother of carbon footprint reduction so as a result we place operational efficiency at the heart of management priorities.
We have in the past, silently from a public perspective invested and changed how we do things in a drive to minimise our energy intensity and carbon footprint as a business park. But this is now no longer the case. We now know from customers who have moved here, that they VERY MUCH want to know what we have done, are doing and intend to do regarding energy consumption and generation.
Green Electricity
For the last five years all our grid electricity has been sourced from renewable sources. Last year saw the installation of 380 solar panels on the roof of one of our business units, to date this has saved 70 tonnes of C02 equivalent, and that is just after 10 months of installation! This equates to about a fifth of the entire carbon footprint of our 22-acre business park.
Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Grade A Offices
Our most recent capital project was replacing an oil boiler with a state-of-the-art Samsung air source heat pump and other infrastructure alterations has enabled us to achieve our first EPC Grade A for office space.
Offices with car charging
The increasing volume of hybrid and battery cars we see in our car parks is very much putting a bank of 22kW car chargers on the shopping list for investment, but we appreciate that too many systems require the pain of downloading apps and email registration! If you have any advice on suppliers, then please get in touch!
Our goal in the next five years
We intend to make Burrough Court self-sufficient in electricity generation and for all our offices and meeting rooms to receive a Grade A on their Energy Performance Certificate.