Sodexo UK and Ireland has been named a Responsible Business Champion in this year’s Business in the Community (BITC) Responsible Business Awards.

The accolade has been awarded in the UPS Environmental Leadership Award category in recognition of Sodexo’s commitments to repair and sustain our planet.

Corporate responsibility is a key pillar of Sodexo’s strategic agenda, and our Better Tomorrow 2025 sustainability plan outlines our commitments to society and the environment.

Better Tomorrow 2025 helps guide our actions as a responsible business, with three specifically designed priorities to tackle the environmental impact of our operations. These are to: 

  • foster a culture of environmental responsibility within our workforce and workspaces
  • source responsibly and provide management services that reduce carbon emissions
  • champion sustainable resource usage

Our environmental efforts have so far seen: 

  • plastic straws and stirrers banned, preventing 3.6m from being used in our business.
  • an increase in reusable bag sales from 1% in 2018 to 94% in October 2019, preventing the sale of 208,632 single use plastic bags. In addition, we have donated £11,743 from the sale of bags to the Marine Conservation Society to help their efforts to reduce pollution in our oceans and on our beaches.  
  • unrecyclable polystyrene items banned from our operations, preventing 12million items from being used. 
  • reusable cups introduced into the business, and used by customers 882,380 times in 2019, and through partnering with Simply Cups, we’ve diverted 838,250 disposable cups from landfill.
  • through our partnership with WasteKnot, which champions the use of ‘perfectly imperfect’ fruit and veg that won’t make it to the supermarket shelves, our Wasteful to Tasteful initiative has saved nearly 110kgs of vegetables and 12kg of fruit from going to landfill. 
  • more than 6,000 meals saved through our partnership with Too Good to Go, the app that shows consumers where they can buy, at discounted prices, surplus meals at the end of a service, which would otherwise go to waste. This equates to a carbon saving of 15,000kg.

Sean Haley, regional chair, Sodexo UK & Ireland, said:

Our corporate responsibility ambitions support our mission to enhance the quality of life and improve the communities we serve.

We know it’s our duty to do all we can to reduce the impact of our operations on the environment, and we are committed to ensuring that all of our employees take this duty seriously.  

Embedding our Better Tomorrow 2025 ambitions throughout the business helps us accomplish this. We know there’s a lot more we can do, but we are proud of our achievements to date and we are delighted to have been recognised as a Responsible Business Champion by BITC.

Amanda Mackenzie OBE, Chief Executive of Business in the Community, said:

Huge congratulations to Sodexo and our other responsible business champions.  In one of the most challenging years yet for responsible businesses, it is a comfort to know that there are organisations like this, whose clear purpose and powerful leadership can set an example to their supply chain and the industry at large.

Our 2020 awards may not have been business as usual but they leave us in no doubt that the UK has everything that it needs to build back responsibly.

 

To view our case study on Business in the Community's website click here

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