We’ve made a start on sustainability. But, hey, has it thrown up some difficult questions. Questions that we did not envisage when we began.

The start we have made is around our commitment to a managed fleet of zero emissions vehicles by 2030 having joined EV100, the organisation representing businesses globally that have committed to zero emission motoring by 2030.

Names that you might recognise as members of EV100 include Aviva, BT Group, Centrica, Deloitte, LeasePlan, Lloyds Banking Group, Siemens, Tesco, and Vattenfall. But all 110 EV100 members of have the one goal – full electrification by 2030.

At Fleet Alliance our own company fleet is now completely electrified and will be fully zero emission by the end of the year as replacement lifecycles play out.

So that’s a good start. In fact, we thought it was a great start. But actually, all that led to further questioning about our position on sustainability.

In many ways, swapping to electric cars is the easy bit – after all we are an automotive leasing company so we should be able to do that successfully. So far, so relatively easy.

But there were nagging questions.

Certainly we had made a statement, made the commitment, but were we doing enough? What about business travel, for example? Should we be taking the plane from Glasgow for client meetings – or would the train be better? (Answer: train.)

Questions, then, lots of them, but little in the way of coherent answers, outcomes that could be channeled into a sustainability strategy plan. So we asked for help. Help from a company that’s called the Eco3 Partnership.

The Eco3 Partnership will assist us to become carbon neutral, which is our ultimate aim, and to meet and surpass Government legislation required for larger enterprises called Streamlined Energy and Carbon reporting. It’s outside the requirements for businesses our size, but we think it’s important that we can exceed those requirements.

So what will it all mean, this going carbon neutral?

As ever, it’s all about our staff. In the same way that our Fleet Alliance Loves embraces our core values of Fairness, Trust, Engagement and Respect, it informs how we look after our people, the community around us and the way we minimise the impact of our business on the environment, so we believe that our people will help us deliver sustainability on a serious level by engaging with them to help the environment. We will also be looking to our suppliers to deliver on sustainable solutions to us.

It’s a significant £10,000 annual investment, but working with Eco3 will enable us to design a framework that identifies our carbon footprint and how we can reduce it to zero by focusing on the three main areas of energy consumption:

• Buildings: These account for 40% of global energy use. New solutions will allow us to measure, manage and control our energy more effectively and efficiently.
• Processes: Some changes could deliver savings in excess of 30%, by making our processes more energy-efficient.
• Transport: Fuel accounts for 20-30% of a vehicle’s whole life cost. Switching to EVs will make a difference, although it won’t carve out the changes needed by itself. We need to embrace other forms of environmentally friendly transport, including active travel, such as walking and cycling.

It’s the start of a deeper journey into sustainability. A journey that we thought we’d cracked by our commitment to a zero emission fleet by 2030. But that was only a beginning. Now we’re going for a carbon scrub. An emissions rinse. A deep clean.

Join us on our journey into sustainability.