Three member companies of The Leaders Council, namely PayByPhone UK, Environmental Crop Management and OCL Regeneration Ltd, have all received accolades at the 2021 Green Apple Awards.
The Green Apple Environment Awards is an annual international campaign to recognise, reward and promote environmental best practice globally. Headed by non-profit venture The Green Organisation since its establishment in 1994, the awards have become established among the most popular and well-known environmental campaigns worldwide.
The awards are fundamental to The Green Organisation’s philosophy of helping others benefit the environment around them. Every year, entries for the awards originate from governments, ministries and local authorities across the world, as well as businesses, organisations and communities spanning the public and private sectors.
The 2021 Green Apple Awards were handed out at a special ceremony, held at The Royal Horseguards Hotel in London. The awards showpiece is traditionally held in a different country each year, and every carbon footprint left by the award winners and their guests by attending is offset by the planting of trees in co-operation with the Green Earth Appeal and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate.
All three of these Leaders Council member companies received awards at the ceremony for their own innovative programmes and ventures that have helped offset their carbon footprint and bring added benefit to the environment. We congratulate them all for their incredible work.
PayByPhone UK
Global mobile parking payments provider, PayByPhone UK, picked up a Gold Green World Award in recognition of its cashless parking technology, which benefits both users and landowners.
A business that has held Carbon Neutral status since May 2019, PayByPhone UK’s product helps the environment with reduced mileage. The company has also offset carbon emissions further through its own tree-planting programmes.
One of these, PayByPhone UK’s Green Christmas initiative, has culminated in the planting of 77,000 trees over the previous two years, and the company is eyeing up the prospect of planting a further 42,000 through partners, Eden Reforestation Projects.
For every 100 parking sessions created through the PayByPhone app platform over the month of December, the company has pledged to plant one tree through mangrove projects in Madagascar via Eden Reforestation Projects.
Meanwhile, the business has launched a similar initiative on a more local scale. Since June 2019, PayByPhone’s Meters for Trees campaign has helped forward-thinking local authorities reduce air pollution by reducing the number of parking machines through to its cashless, mobile parking service.
For every ten machines, PayByPhone donates one tree to the local council and helps to save as much as a tonne of carbon dioxide through a Verified Carbon Standard audited project in the Amazon Rainforest.
Jonny Combe, CEO of PayByPhone UK, said: “Our collaboration with Carbon Footprint Ltd on Meters for Trees has helped us realise exactly how we could support our clients lower carbon emissions in their areas. And it’s more straight-forward than you would imagine; with traditional parking machines, enforcement vehicles drive tens of thousands of miles per year just to maintain and to collect cash from machines. Cashless parking in contrast contributes towards the improvement in air quality in a borough simply by removing the need for these vehicles to be on the road.”
Environmental Crop Management
Environmental Crop Management [ECM], an agronomy services provider renowned as one of the best crop protection companies in the world, was presented with a 2021 Gold Green Apple Award for Farming and a Green World Ambassador Trophy as well as a Corporate Responsibility Award for training students and young farmers.
The company also received its 2020 Green World Silver Award, an accolade that would have been given out at last year’s ceremony, which was cancelled due to the pandemic.
ECM has long been a pioneer in its field, working to prove that profitability and environmental responsibility can go together. It acts as a bridge between agriculturalists and conservationists and has worked with farmers to inform them on the benefits of conservation and how it can tie in with profitable food production.
Its latest successes at the Green Apple Awards take the business’ tally to 24 Green Apple Awards in total, alongside its nine Green Hero Awards for its part in major schemes including the reintroduction of the Barn Owl, minimising farm waste, reducing the levels of pesticides being used in agriculture, and educating farmers in the latest technologies to help protect the environment.
ECM’s research into responsible use of pesticides has been conducted jointly with Manchester Metropolitan University and has resulted in numerous doctorates being awarded.
OCL Regeneration Ltd
OCL Regeneration is a company that was founded with sustainability at its heart. Its mission statement is to champion the increased use of more sustainable construction materials and the recycling of construction and demolition waste.
In 2021, OCL Regeneration’s exploits were sufficient to warrant a Green Apple Environment Award, which recognised the impact of its new recycling facility in Micheldever, Hampshire, constructed on behalf of Hampshire County Council.
The Hampshire County Council Highway Materials Recycling Facility became operational earlier this year and is already providing carbon-neutral solutions for local roads and bringing the local authority into the forefront of innovative material re-use and use of recycling technology.
What the facility does is allow Hampshire Highways to reprocess and recycle materials generated from road repairs, which are then re-used in road maintenance. This cuts down on carbon emissions, costs and travel miles.
Most of these carbon reductions arise from two techniques. Firstly, recycling tar-bound material on-site is historically a specialist disposal that can also be very costly. Secondly, by reducing the use of virgin aggregates and replacing some warm and hot mix traditional asphalts with cold lay materials, Hampshire County Council is targeting a 40 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and an 80 per cent reduction in energy compared to the use of traditional materials.
The reduction in highway construction cost is anticipated to save Hampshire County Council up to £320,000 per year.
OCL Regeneration’s work for Hampshire County Council sets an example to all other councils across the UK, who will need to mobilise its resources in a similar vein to comply with their climate change strategies on a local scale, which will help facilitate the UK’s drive toward Net Zero.
OCL Regeneration managing director, Stuart Gready, commented: “At OCL our philosophy is to reduce carbon footprint and whole life costs wherever possible. The Micheldever facility is a great example of how we operate and is a testament to what can be done when there is a commitment and strong stakeholder support to sustainability and recycling materials.
“I wholeheartedly believe that the work with Hampshire County Council and Milestone Infrastructure is going to quickly yield results that will be held up as a model for how local authorities and private asset owners should look to dispose of waste, reduce carbon output and promote recycling of materials.”
Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash
