🌱 Getting In The Mix: 5 Tools to Engage Employees in Climate Action.

Featuring OGGS, UpCircle, Sipsmith, Drop Bear Beer Co and more...

Feb 28, 2022

Happy Monday!

This week we’re focusing on getting stuck in….to employee climate engagement and pancake day! What a combination! We cover:

Get involved: 5 employee engagement tools for any business.
OGGS: An aquafaba-lous way to participate in pancake day
In case you missed it: 🌱 Donate, Don't Incinerate: Nine organisations your brand can partner with to redistribute surplus stock.

Reminder: we’re collecting entries to our upcoming MITIGATE database. Working with a partner to reduce your emissions? A reduction partner yourself? Submit here.

> Good News Last Week

🎯 UpCircle announced they’re ‘plastic negative’, after partnering with rePurpose Global to remove twice as much ocean bound plastic as they cause.

🎯 Drop Bear Beer Co announced they’re working towards becoming the world’s first carbon neutral alcohol free brewery. They’re working with ClimatePartner and AMRC.

🎯 Homethings, Sapling Spirits and fiid announced they’ve achieved B Corp Certification

🎯 Swedish fungi protein company Mycorena announced they’ve partnered with CarbonCloud to assess the footprint of their products.

⭐️ Allbirds announced Rerun, their shoe resale platform. US customers will be able to trade their slightly imperfect and gently used sneakers for $20 in store credit by dropping them off at one of three retail locations in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City. The shoes will be refurbished by Trove.

⭐️ Asda announced it is rolling out plastic-free free food protection technology, produced by Apeel Sciences. Apeel Sciences’ materials is sprayed onto produce and acts as a barrier, holding moisture in and oxygen out. This extends the shelf lifetime of the produce with out the necessity for packaging. This will launch in 150 Asda stores.

⭐️ Guinness, a Diageo brand, announced plans for a 3 year regenerative agriculture programme aimed at reducing carbon emissions from its barley production in Ireland. The first phase of the programme is set to kick off this year covering at least 40 farms.

⭐️ Perfetti Van Melle is making its Mentos Pure Fresh Gum available in a 90% paperboard bottle. The Boardio technology designed bottle will include instructions for recycling using typical U.S. curbside services or local drop-off programs.

⚡️ Fashion for Good announced its latest project, “Untapped Agricultural Waste”. The global initiative aims to turn agricultural waste into fibres. To achieve this, they’ve partnered with Laudes Foundation, Adidas, Bestseller, Vivobarefoot and Birla Cellulose alongside six innovators - AltMat, Bananatex, Chlorohemp, Agraloop by Circular Systems, HempTex India and 9Fiber.

> Click on each link to read more.

> Quick Take

Get involved: 5 employee engagement tools for any business.

As climate impact is being prioritised more and more within companies, it’s more necessary than ever for employee climate literacy and engagement to be prioritised too. Last week, EY announced they’re partnering with Hult International Business School to launch a fully accredited Masters in Sustainability for all 312,000 EY employees. If you’re part of your company’s sustainability team, or the solo sustainability-focused employee, you’ll be well aware of the power in engaging your wider team in the journey of building a climate positive company. A little climate literacy can go a long way, and it’s fast becoming a necessity. After all, every job is really a climate job.

How can you engage your colleagues and employees? Finding or building an employee sustainability programme is a great way to close the climate-skills gap and provide the tools for every individual to become a change agent.

It’s a great solution, especially if you need a bit of a nudge to get started, but where do you start - especially as an SME? Luckily, there are lots of tools popping up which are doing the hard work for you.

Here are 5 tools to help you engage your employees and colleagues:

If you are a Sustainability Lead looking for a ready-to-go sustainability programme with a high impact, Giki Earth have got your back. Their Giki Pro toolkit calculates the individual footprints of your team, quantifying their everyday actions and consumptions to help your team make informed decisions. With leader boards and challenges, the programme breaks down the challenge into bite size chunks and brings a competitive edge!

Want to up-skill your workforce to become a business full of strategic thinkers? A climate first for the food industry: Veris Strategies will help you benchmark, build programmes, create campaigns and nail your comms. With employee engagement programmes built for your business to empower your team to challenge the status quo and let them drive the sustainability strategies! Not sure how to get started? Their Accelerator programme will take you through the steps to Net Zero in just 6 weeks.

Need to boost your company’s climate literacy? On a mission to empower a community to tackle the global challenges that are shaping our world, Teams for a Better Planet offers workshops to elevate your team’s ‘Climate IQ’! From 2-hour workshops to multiple sessions, their courses have the option to build a module based on your company’s commitments to engage employees with internal benchmarks. Check out their ‘Lunch & Learns’ for a quick burst of inspiration for becoming a climate problem solver.

Need help sharing an understanding of the climate crisis across your entire business? After all, climate literacy is a foundation for rapid action. Make Tomorrow is creating waves by setting the scene across the company and giving employees the tools to innovate. With more understanding comes more action and demonstrating commitment to the climate has never been simpler.

Do your employees care about the climate but don’t know how to make an impact within the business? They can check out Work for Climate. Anyone can 10x their climate impact with the right tools. Take inspiration from their guides to decarbonising and share ideas with others on their slack community. Not just for sustainability professionals and particularly great to connect with others facing similar challenges.

Looking for more inspiration?

Read how Sipsmith engaged their employees via their Kaizen programme.
Check out this guide for building a Green Team in your company by Leaders for Climate Action (don’t miss their community tool too!).
Read through planetgroup’s 50+ Ways To Drive Sustainability: Climate Leadership for Employees guide.
Get involved with the Fashion Declares Lunchtime drop-in sessions to discuss challenges and opportunities within the fashion industry in addressing the nature, climate and social emergency.
Check out Low Carbon Business School’s ‘Introduction to Low Carbon Business’ free 5 day email course, as an easy introduction to climate literacy for your colleagues.
Become an Ally: Veris Strategies have just launched The Future Food Movement as a space for individuals and businesses to connect, share knowledge and form a movement through everyday activism.
Finally - pledge to take climate action as a company. Leaders for Climate Action are calling for companies to join their Time for Climate Action campaign, which will run from 18-24th of April 2022. Find out more here, and sign up here.

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OGGS: An aquafaba-lous way to participate in pancake day.

OGGS are a company that are on a mission to make saving the planet a piece of cake. Founded in 2018, the OGGS mission is to remove all the hidden animal protein in the food chain. How? By offering plant-based alternatives to everyday foods that taste as delicious as we’ve always known them to be.

They’ve started this quest with eggs. With some pretty scary stats around the kitchen staple (as in over 60% of the world’s eggs being produced in industrial systems, mostly using barren battery cages), OGGS are focusing on reducing the environmental and ethical impact of the baking industry. OGGS offers a egg-alternative made from aquafaba (a chickpea by-product) with a carbon footprint 72% less than your average chicken egg. They’re putting their own product to the test - with OGGs cakes, bites and deserts available for purchase too.

It doesn’t stop there. OGGS have teamed up with restaurant giants such as Bills and Bella Italia to boost their B2B sales and make egg-alternatives a viable on-premise alternative. Co-founder Hannah Carter raised a really good point. In her interview with Food4Media, Hannah stated “We want everyone to enjoy OGGS. If only vegans ate our cakes we wouldn't be driving enough change, as they don't eat eggs anyway!”, and with a continuous rating of over 4.5/5 across all review platforms and a growing list of stockists including Tesco, Waitrose and Coop, her goal is fast becoming reality. OGGS is well and truly making it clear to kitchens and consumers that the switch to plant based is a move everyone can get involved with.

What else are they doing for the environment, aside from making plant-based pancakes way easier?

OGGS packaging is made from 100% recycled, plant based or sustainable sourced materials. It’s all recyclable and compostable - even the recycled plastic, which will completely biodegrade if it ends up in landfill. So far, they’ve replaced 19,324 pieces of plastic with this recycled alternative (May 2021 figures). The buzz around the brand is well earned - soon, all their energy will be 100% renewable. Oh, they’ve already partnered with 8 Billion Trees to plant their own forest of 4,750 trees (May 2021 figures).

Ready to take OGGS’ Pancake Pledge?

Want to make the change and put OGGS to the test? This shrove Tuesday, more widely referred to as pancake day, OGGS are asking you to pledge to using plant-based alternatives. They’re even offering you a voucher for a FREE 200ml carton of OGGS® Aquafaba to say thank you. All you have to do is register here.

Need more convincing? We recommend trying this pancake recipe (as if we really need more convincing to eat pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner) - let us know how you get on!

Support OGGS via their shop:

Shop OGGS

*OGGS’ Aquafaba. Source: asiantrader.biz*

> In case you missed it

🌱 Donate, Don't Incinerate: Nine organisations your brand can partner with to redistribute surplus stock.