THP Sutton awarded Green Mark accreditation

THP’s Sutton Branch is delighted to have been awarded a Level 1 Green Mark accreditation. Green Mark provides an internationally recognised environmental certification for companies that want to assure their clients and employees that they are conducting business to recognised environmental standards.

Sutton Council invited us to apply for Green Mark accreditation as part of its Green Enterprise Partnership (GEP). The GEP aims to help businesses thrive while also helping them to take advantage of the benefits of sustainability, such as reduced energy bills and increased customer engagement.

The GEP’s ‘Go Green Scheme’ encourages local firms to achieve Green Mark accreditation. In return, successful businesses benefit from a 70% discount on their business rates bill, with the remaining 30% going to the GEP as a partnership fee.

How we got Green Mark accreditation

Green Mark offers sustainability certification that assesses, audits and certifies a business’s impact on the environment.

Through Green Mark’s online portal, we submitted information about our business, answered questions and provided supporting evidence. An auditor then reviewed the answers and awarded us a Green Mark Level 1. Robyn, a Customer Service Executive at Green Mark told us:

Congratulations to you at THP Ltd. on becoming Green Mark Level 1 certified! You had fantastic submission scoring 100% across the board.

As part of the process, Green Mark helped us create a framework to make sure we have the correct tools to monitor and reduce our emissions, as well as communicating internally and externally how we are doing this.

Our Green Mark action plan

Our Green Mark action plan will help us to reduce the environmental impact of our business. We have already implemented many measures, such as identifying inefficient appliances, introducing a hazardous waste policy for the proper disposal of batteries, printer ink and toner, plus supporting a hybrid working style to help cut travel emissions.

We are now working on a number of other action points. These include looking at environmental policy training for new recruits and creating a small budget which we can use to offset out carbon footprint. One idea we’re discussing is placing some more wildlife-friendly plants in front of our office, which faces a busy road.

Our environmental policy

The bedrock of our approach to sustainability is our environmental policy, which we review annually. This contains practical steps to help us reduce our carbon footprint by 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2050. The policy has been strengthened as a direct result of our application for Green Mark accreditation.

These are just some of our environmental policies:

• Reducing the amount of paper we use, with the aim of becoming a ‘paperless office’
• Including sustainability criteria when planning operations and when buying equipment and supplies
• Recycling all office waste, ensuring none is sent to landfill
• Providing a salary sacrifice scheme to help staff buy or lease electric vehicles.

Level 2 Green Mark accreditation

Applying for Green Mark accreditation helped us to focus on making positive steps to reduce our environmental impace. We’d like to thank Anna Nagalingum, responsible for Client & Team Support at THP Sutton, for her hard work in securing Green Mark accreditation. We’re now working towards achieving Level 2 in 2025!