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We are proud to announce that we’ve partnered with Zellar to accelerate our journey to Net Zero and beyond. At Marriott Motor Group, reducing our environmental impact is extremely important to us, which is why it has become one of our core values.
Zellar is a subscription service that enables us to benchmark and score the sustainability of each of our dealerships and then connects all the dots to make our everyday business sustainable business. Zellar helps us understand how we can reduce our consumption, our emissions and our bills. The platform helps us navigate every step of our journey to Net Zero and recommends how we can transition to green energy, run smarter with green tech and get local on bio-diversity stewardship and volunteering. We’ll be sharing our journey via a live sustainability profiles and scores for all of our dealerships. All the proof we need to engage transparently with customers, suppliers and employees on every aspect of their sustainability journey.
Our initial objective is to achieve Carbon Net Zero, which means we will not produce more greenhouse gases than those we are removing (scope 1 & 2). However, our strategic direction won’t stop there, our long-term goal is to go beyond this by extending carbon reduction to incorporate our partners and third party suppliers (scope 3 & 4) so we will only be working with companies who have the same vision and values as we do. We’re super excited to go on this sustainability journey and we urge other businesses and individuals to look at their environmental impact and take action to reduce their carbon footprint too.
Where to start?
With Zellar’s advice on starting points, we started by finding out how to measure our current carbon footprint specifically relating to the energy consumed from operating from our premises. From this in-depth analysis we have been able to determine areas for improvement and actions we can take to help achieve our objective.
Part of our initial measurement involved some consultancy with another local company, LCS Energy to do an energy survey of our Audi dealership in Bury St Edmunds. This allowed us to identify exactly where our energy was being consumed and therefore enabling us to investigate ways of reducing this.
For example, we were alarmed to discover that 35% of our energy usage was during the hours when the Dealership was physically closed. After this discovery and with the help of LCS energy, we put our heating and air conditioning on timers and invested in upgrading our LED lights around the showrooms and offices along with installing additional light motion sensors and adjusting the brightness of our lighting by around 20%. The most recent LED lights are even more environmentally friendly simply because they use less energy, last significantly longer and are more recyclable than the older equivalents. This combined with our addition of new light sensors makes them highly efficient, reduces our carbon footprint significantly. We are now replicating this survey exercise across all of our premises with a view to implementing similar improvements where these are identified.
Furthermore, we have appointed ‘Sustainability Champions’ at a number of our sites who are helping to spot areas for improvement on a daily basis. Regular meetings are held for everyone to share their carbon-cutting ideas across the business and we are already looking at some great ideas and solutions to enable emission and waste reduction in several areas of the business. This will continue to evolve and is sure to become a permanent and ongoing fixture within our business.
At the start of August 2022, we launched a pilot at Ipswich Volkswagen offering customers the ability to opt out of their Courtesy Service vehicle wash in exchange for our investment in the restoration of 12 hectares of Peatland in Gameshope Loch, Scotland. Just 1 less service wash will save on average 90.9g of CO2 and 80L of water. By having 15 customers opt for this each day (around a third of our daily workshop visits) this would reduce the water consumption by 300,000 litres per year, along with reducing the Co2e by some 25 Tonnes in the same period. Peatland offsets reduce carbon emissions from the first year that the restoration work is completed. This has an advantage over tree planting projects, which take 25+ years to start absorbing a significant amount of carbon.
This pilot has received really positive reactions so far and subject to the final evaluation of the pilot we are looking to work with Zellar to expand this initiative to our other dealerships.
Our ground-breaking partnership with Zellar underlines our strategic commitment to sustainable business. We’re proud to be starting out our on our journey to Net Zero together. Zellar is helping us and other progressive businesses lead cultural change and lay down a path for other companies to follow.
Gary Styles, founder and chief executive of the pioneering sustainability-as-a-service company, added:
“Zellar is designed to accelerate exactly this kind of community climate action for Britain’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We’re here to help businesses take their first steps and lead the change.
We understand the compound pressures posed by rising inflation and energy prices and the need to take climate action.
Zellar exists to support SMEs and help them navigate today’s crisis while also solving for a more sustainable future because responsible, sustainable businesses are also likely to be more competitive, profitable businesses in the long run.”
We took part in Great Big Green Week, take a look at our video to see what we got up to!
Throughout all of our dealerships we have employed a 'Switch Off Routine' at the end of every day to reduce our energy usage when it is not required, which in turn will reduce unnecessary CO2 in the atmosphere. We aim to switch off anything that will possibly use electricity including lights, computers, water machines, workshop machines and printers. So far we have found this very successful and we look forward to assessing the results over time.
Adblue Barrels
We are always looking out for 'green' initiatives as part of our Environmental company value and our most recent waste-reduction action has been to recycle our empty Adblue barrels. So far, we have given 4 barrels to schools for outside areas and 26 barrels to farmers and horse paddocks for water troughs, feed trays and storage.
It's lovely to be able to help the community as well as the environment through re-using what would have just been waste. If you or anyone you know of would also be interested in some barrels, please contact us.
Keep your eyes on this page as we keep you updated with our latest environmental actions!
