Impact beyond the factory walls
One of the many excellent passages in the book Energetic which didn’t quite make it into my ClimateCultures review today is this interview with Gordon Macrae at Gripple:
“One of the things we recognised, probably about seven or eight years ago, was that we have an environmental impact. It started from having the Carbon Trust come in and do an energy audit. They said, ‘Your carbon footprint is great, you’re only using 500 tonnes of carbon.’ And I thought about that and said, ‘That’s rubbish!’ because if you look at the amount of carbon that we’re using, up and down the supply chain, it’s significantly more than that.”
The company insider clearly knew so much more than the expert outsider – and not just about his business, obviously, but about our environment. In my time with Southampton Environment Centre it was an uphill struggle to get small businesses to acknowledge energy and waste issues at all. But even then, when they made the connection, a motivated manager made all the difference to finding solutions. Macrae describes energy mapping up and down Gripple’s supply chain.