As we move swiftly into the new year, we’d like to pause momentarily and take stock of the magnitude of the environmental achievements we made last year! As a fast-growing, dynamic transport business, minimising our environmental impact was always going to be a challenge but one we felt was totally achievable.
In January 2021 we formed a working partnership with Ecologi, a platform which allows businesses to fund climate projects and offset their carbon footprint. This new partnership immediately made our entire workforce climate positive, a fantastic accolade in itself. However, our ultimate target was to offset the entire carbon footprint of our road transportation business.
To succeed in our ambition to be carbon neutral, and working with Ecologi, we set a company pledge to plant one tree for every customer delivery made by Firstpoint in 2021.
The first challenge in understanding our ‘carbon’ impact was to begin recording the footprint of our road transportation services. We undertook this survey with confidence, knowing that the Ecologi platform would enable us to offset our carbon emissions by funding some of their carbon reduction projects, such as tree planting, once the carbon off-set was calculated.
By the end of the first month, we had a very clear idea of how many miles we had driven in that period, the resulting carbon footprint and the amount of carbon reduction required to off-set it.
Working with these calculations we decided to set ourselves some audacious targets, in particular vowing to plant 50,000 trees in the calendar year. At times this seemed almost impossible but through the hard work of our team, and more importantly the commitment of our loyal customers we are proud to say that we completely smashed the target.
In total we clocked over 1.1m miles in 2021, off-setting over 440 tonnes of carbon resulting in over 50,000 trees being planted in our name.
These achievements have not gone unnoticed, with Firstpoint bagging business award nominations at both Bristol Life and Business Live.
Of course, we won’t be resting on our laurels, this is just the start for us on our eco-adventure as we plan to blow 2021’s total out of the water, so please watch out for more exciting updates from the Firstpoint team.