SUEZ: Fulfilling our new purpose
Making biodiversity a key part of your business purpose and empowering employees to put nature first
What we know
In 2020, we made a commitment to put nature first, when we launched our new purpose “to shape a sustainable environment, now”.
And we’ve been delivering that through our actions and governance. Every day, we commit to preserving the environment’s natural capital: water, soil, and air.
We actively invest in preserving, restoring and enhancing natural capital now, and for the future. Our time-bound commitments to act4nature international, recognised by the Business for Nature Coalition help us accelerate our nature positive initiatives and actions. We have also set a target to improve biodiversity across every one of our 300+ sites in 2021.
What we’re doing
Our nature positive actions grow from our commitments and purpose.
Alongside maintaining our ISO 14001 certification, and ensuring that we continually improve our environmental performance, we have introduced our core company value of passion for the environment, and two critical success factors: sustainable environment and social value.
Sustainable environment
We act to protect and improve the environment by reducing our carbon emissions and resources while supporting nature and creating a culture that goes beyond compliance.
Social value
We deliver services that are socially responsible and create measurable social benefits. We strive to continually enhance our contribution, reputation and trust in the communities we serve and to provide meaningful and equitable employment opportunities.
Our purpose, values and critical success factors have provided organisational clarity for our employees, empowering them to take action locally to contribute to our overall purpose and improve biodiversity.
To support our journey we have also introduced the Sustainability Champion Network, empowering our sustainability champions representing every one of our sites in implementing our 10 sustainability principles, one of which is ‘Take action for nature.’
What it’s worth
These changes have resulted in significant improvements and actions across our sites.
Our employees have created new habitats for nature from the re-wilding of areas, installation of numerous bat, bird and owl boxes, as well as beehives, hedgehog houses and bug hotels.
We also have many other successes. For example, on site of our Tees Valley Energy from waste facility, in partnership with the local beekeeping society, we installed two beehives. This opened the door to a partnership with BeeOdiversity to take quarterly pollen analysis and further improve biodiversity through informed recommendations, as well other developing other partnerships to facilitate educational visits from local schools and train a number of our staff in beekeeping.
These local biodiversity activities are in addition to the restoration of 2,000Ha of land, the planting of 287,000 trees and 13,000m of hedgerows since 2002.
Testimonial
SUEZ and the waste and resources sector can play a significant role in protecting, preserving, and enhancing biodiversity, the foundation of life. From the wider role of the circular economy and its contribution to preserving primary resources and protecting habitats, to valuing and embracing the opportunities to improve biodiversity within our value chain. I look forward to the future for how we at SUEZ, together with the sector and beyond, can take an instrumental role in protecting and enhancing the natural capital.
Leigh Broadhurst Environment and Sustainable Development Lead, SUEZ Recycling and Recovery UK
