Chatterton Homes - Building Better
Since 2017, Chatterton Homes has been exclusively building passive homes; extremely energy-efficient buildings in which a comfortable interior climate can be maintained without active heating.
Misco Joinery’s environmental journey may have started out as a savvy business move, but it’s quickly blossomed into a new way of thinking and a point of pride for the Kaiapoi-based business and its 70-strong team.
When Misco’s management team noticed that potential clients were asking for the company’s sustainability credentials, they knew it was time to focus on their environmental efforts. Despite having one of New Zealand’s largest and most efficient solar farms on their factory roof, clients wanted more.
“That was the driver for us to look into achieving some sort of accreditation, which led us to the Toitū Enviromark Programme,” explains Misco Joinery General Manager Penny Abell.
The programme - one of several offered by Toitū Envirocare – aims to ensure organisations are managing their environmental impacts in a meaningful way by developing, implementing and maintaining a robust Environmental Management System (EMS). Participating organisations can achieve one of three Toitū Enviromark certification levels – bronze, gold or diamond (with the latter exceeding the requirements for the international standard for environmental management) – and have to then work to continually uphold or improve on the accreditation requirements.
“When we started out, we thought we’d probably be able to achieve the Toitū Bronze Enviromark,” explains Penny. “But as we started working through the requirements, we realised we were actually doing a lot of this stuff already. Then someone said, ‘let’s just go for gold’. And we did!”
With those 530 rooftop solar panels already doing some seriously heavy lifting in terms of the company’s carbon emission reductions, the team was well on its way to reaching gold, but there was still a fair bit of work to do.
“One of the biggest things we did was change the waste company we use,” explains Penny. “We switched to EnviroNZ (formerly Envirowaste) as they provide a report to show us exactly where our waste is going and how we are reducing our environmental footprint. Following this we introduced additional things like boxes on desks to recycle paper, adding a polystyrene recycling bin to the bins we already have, installing electric vehicle charges in our carpark, and looking at where we could stop using paper altogether and just do things on screen.
“Overall, this has all led to a reduction in the amount of waste we’re producing and we’ve found that the whole team have started thinking more about what’s going to waste and how it can be re-used or re-purposed. We had a team member recently who noticed a wooden pallet going to waste so she took it home and turned it into a compost bin! We’ve also re-used wooden pallets and board cover sheets to build containers to transport our kitchens around the country.
“It’s things like this that make you realise that since we started this journey, all the staff are thinking about it all the time and are looking out for opportunities to re-use or reduce our waste.”
But the journey certainly doesn’t end there for Misco. As part of their Toitū accreditation, the company will be monitored annually to ensure they are maintaining their required benchmarks.
“We have to keep looking at and improving things continuously,” explains Penny, who says there are already plans afoot. “We’re hoping to develop a waste area where we can bring all our different bins together to make it even easier for the team, and so we can introduce even more sorting – like a bin for each type of recyclable – one for cans, one for each type of plastic, that sort of thing. We’re also looking at how we can minimise and better use our food waste.”
Although the shift in thinking across the whole team, and the collective sense of pride at achieving Toitū Gold is enough reward for undertaking this process, Penny acknowledges that the original motivation for gaining accreditation has also been realised.
“We originally set out on this journey because we were aware that to win major contracts we had to have sustainability accreditation. For a large number of enterprises that we wanted to work with, that was one of their criteria and they would ask, specifically, ‘what are you doing for the environment?’. We now have an answer to that.
“And with the solar panels, we’ve reduced our power costs by 60-70%. So they’re all good business decisions as well as being better for the environment.”
For these reasons, Penny and the Misco team encourage other local businesses to look into achieving Toitū accreditation. “Don’t be daunted by it,” says Penny. “It’s an easier journey than you’d think, because you’ll be surprised how much you’re actually already doing without realising it. It takes time, but you’ve probably already got a lot of things in place to get you started, like we did.”