Nairn’s Oatcakes (Nairn’s) manufacture traditional Scottish oatcakes in Edinburgh with locally sourced wholegrain oats.
As a socially responsible business, Nairn’s has an Environmental Policy committing it to improving all aspects of its environmental performance for the benefit of employees, customers, consumers and local community.
To translate this policy into operational practice and deliver on its commitments, Nairn’s has established a Green Team to work across the organisation, foster a culture of continuous improvement and develop an environmental management system.
To identify opportunities for reducing energy and resource use, Nairn’s worked with the Carbon Trust to calculate its carbon footprinting and had staff attend a variety of environmental workshops with Envirowise (now Zero Waste Scotland).
A Green Business Partnership Student Placement was arranged to look at the practical implementation these opportunities and develop an energy use monitoring database. An employee energy awareness week was organised and energy efficient lighting subsequently installed throughout the premises.
Nairn’s Oatcakes have long been committed recyclers, finding alternatives to landfill for waste food, paper, card and plastics. However, they felt that there was scope for better understanding of wastage throughout their operations and used the student placement project to collect the baseline information.
This work, together with a detailed register of environmental impacts and relevant legislation, will contribute to the documentation required to main an environmental management system certified to ISO14001, a project Nairn’s will next focus its attention on.
A robust environmental management system should then provide the foundation to drive further resource efficiency and recycling initiatives to further reduce the company’s environmental impact.
Speaking about their environmental initiatives in a recent interview with Business Review Europe, Mark Laing, Nairn’s Managing Director noted that “we care about the environment and are working at taking sensible steps to improve our performance” and suggested this type of initiatives helped enhanced Nairn’s reputation.
