Queen’s green scene

Awards scheme tips a royal hat to sustainable businesses What kind of company gives its employees bicycles for the daily commute? Or buys a wood chipper to ensure none of the wooden pallets it receives from suppliers end up in landfills? Look into any corner of the operations of organic food delivery firm Abel & Cole, and you’ll see something being done about the environmental impacts that usually plague the world of business. Worried about food miles and climate change? Abel & Cole pledges never to buy air-freighted produce and its fleet of vans runs on biodiesel. Worried about how much food is wasted by retailers? Abel & Cole’s excess fruit and veg is sent to London Zoo and fed to the elephants. What about families that can’t afford to buy organic? The company has come up with The Farmer’s Choice, a scheme so popular that it can barely keep up with demand. It works like this:
  • Abel & Cole sells bags of organic produce to participating schools on a non-profit basis;
  • parent-teacher associations sell the bags on to mums and dads for a slightly higher but still affordable price;
  • the schools keep the profits to pay for new playground equipment, library books and the like.
This year Abel & Cole is one of eight companies to win a 2005 Queen’s Award for Sustainable Development. According to founder Keith Abel, it’s nothing to do with long and boring “environmental policy” meetings or dry documents about “environmental objectives”. It is simply the product of a company culture that says “yes” to employees when they have an idea about how to cut environmental impacts. If employees know there’s a good chance their ideas will become reality, they come up with all sorts of ingenious suggestions, argues Abel. The seven other winners of the 2005 Queen’s Awards for Sustainable Development are Suffolk brewers Adnams; environmental consultancy Best Foot Forward, who specialise in ecological footprinting; West Country property business Clinton Devon Estates; cycle tourism firm Country Lanes; independent tea supplier Global Tea & Commodities; wind farm developer Renewable Energy Systems; and ‘green’ beach café entrepreneurs the Venus Company. - Erin Gill

21 July 2005

Erin Gill