George Meredith, Associate in our Regeneration team explains Newsteer’s commitment to sustainability and how we are building environmental awareness across the whole business.
“In Spring 2022, Newsteer partnered with sustainability experts, Plannet Zero, to help us audit and verify our carbon footprint, get advice on efficiencies and offset our remaining emissions. These actions have led to Newsteer becoming a certified carbon positive business. Our activity – and offsetting – goes beyond achieving carbon neutral emissions, in fact creating an environmental benefit by reducing additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Our story
As a company of 30 people, we have an individual and collective impact on our environment. From the very start of Newsteer’s journey, we were acutely aware of how we affect the environment around us. One of our key focuses from day one was to mitigate our carbon footprint.
Founded in 2019, the pandemic did much to ‘encourage’ this approach – with remote working meaning less travel and time in the office. Climate change is a huge issue for the real estate industry, and rightly so. Changes in government procurement and the expectations of our clients means that we have to keep the environment at the forefront of everything we do, and ensure we are doing everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. Against a backdrop of a general cultural shift in awareness of climate change, we have sought to positively address climate change as an integral part of how we move forward as a business.
The Plannet Zero journey 
Plannet Zero’s One Two Zero programme is a bespoke solution that encourages companies such as ourselves on our sustainability journey, with the initial aim to become certified as operationally carbon neutral.
Plannet Zero supported us in calculating our total operational carbon footprint for 2021 as 52.13 tCO2 – equating to slightly less than the average SME (59 tCO2). We then broke this down further so that everyone in the business could be accountable and would understand the importance of their role in this journey – 1.72 tCO2 per person.
In return, we have committed to supporting vital projects, including wind and forestry projects, to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. With the offsetting equating to 200% of our total footprint, a commitment to invest in 104tCO2e carbon credits, this means that we are now an operational carbon positive business.
Next steps
While the aim was to be certified operational carbon neutral, we are excited that we have already taken a step further to becoming carbon positive. This work has given us much more clarity about carbon reduction and what we are trying to achieve. Our carbon output has been brought into our overall business strategy – and anything we can do to we can change our processes to improve our carbon output is a big step in the right direction.
With the ongoing support of the Plannet Zero team, we move onto the next stage of the programme which is focused on collaboration, with a 5% annual reduction pathway in place and fully embedded into the business. We are on the way to becoming a wholly paperless office – and where some struggle (it’s a journey!) we use recycled paper. We have switched to digital business cards – and Jayne, one of our higher individual carbon users has assured us that the solar panels fitted to her roof are set to lower her footprint even further!”
Download Newsteer’s Carbon Reduction Plan