Ordinary business has to wake up, says John Griffin, CEO Addison Lee

We don’t sit here worrying about the environment

For Addison Lee, it’s always been about the commercial benefits – more than the green agenda. We made the company more efficient, and as a result, its carbon footprint kept shrinking. It was a series of steps, starting with simple things like fitting windows with high insulation ratings. Our ‘green’ action plan said to put better windows on the first floor, but the cost benefits were so clear that we did the whole building.

Investment has already paid off

We have over 2,500 cars on the road, but we use very sophisticated GPS technology to plan their routes so that they never have to travel more than half a mile between jobs. It’s halved their average journey distance. There’s a ‘going home’ button that the drivers press, and the allocator pulls up a job along the way so that their car is never empty. It’s reduced dead (non-income-generating) mileage by 17.6%.

Efficiency has meant we laughed our way through the recession 

We are up 9% on this week last year, which is a great position to be in when the industry as a whole is in recession. The average company in our sector is 20% down, so we must be doing something right. In just one year, we’ve saved £185,000 through energy efficiency measures. It pays.  

It’s no secret that contractors are looking for green credentials

…And I think companies ignore this at their peril. Our turnover is around £175 million a year, and as much as half of that is through contracts. There’s a lot of competition around, and businesses are more inclined to offer contracts to companies with a strong green agenda, a real plan.

We’re growing, but our footprint isn’t

We log our carbon for the whole company, and so if we double in size, we track our emissions as doubling in size. But in fact, we are growing as a company – more cars, more passengers, more turnover – and our emissions are still falling. We’ve cut our carbon emissions by 30% on our 2002 baseline, the year we began our green policies and practices, and we have a target to reach 60% by 2025.

Ordinary business has to wake up

You have to get people with ordinary businesses, not eco businesses, to understand their responsibility to the planet. And you do this by telling them that if you find the right balance between commerce and sustainability, it will pay! The balance we’ve found is a really good one. But we can’t green the cab industry on our own: everybody’s got to be on board.

John Griffin was in conversation with Anna Simpson.

25 January 2010

Anna Simpson

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