Adnams brews up company-wide approach to sustainability

BusinessGreen.com: You were recently awarded an OBE for services to corporate social responsibility, where did the company's focus on sustainability and CSR come from?
Jonathan Adnams: Adnams was established in 1872. As such we've been here for the long term and want to be sustainable for the long term. About 15 years ago we undertook an exercise to try and build our brand and part of that was to try and establish what our brand values were. We drew up a formal list of 10 values and at the core was a belief that any business that wants to operate for the long term needs to build respect from customers, neighbours and the environment. If you are not respected at some point you get a fracture point in the brand, and there are many examples of businesses allowing that to happen.

Where did the environment fit into these values?
The need to protect the environment was one of the core values. There wasn't some conscious decision to go green it was just part of the over-arching value set, but in more recent times that has filtered through to influence some of the infrastructure decisions we have made.

How has it affected your operations?
Our distribution centre which opened in Raydon in 2006 was the first industrial building in the UK to be built using entirely sustainable material and features hemp-lined building blocks and a green roof that actually absorbs carbon. While our new brewery in Southwold, which opened in 2007, is the first brewery in the UK to include a full energy recovery plant. We capture 90 per cent of the steam produced during the brewing process and reuse for heat across the facility – that has saved up 31 per cent on our gas bills. We also reduced the weight of our bottles by 34 per cent, which has saved 415 tonnes of CO2 a year, or equivalent to the transport-related carbon emissions of our entire sales force.

Those are all large infrastructure projects. What about day-to-day activities?
We encourage staff to switch off lights and computers and so on, but as I said we have worked hard to really make these values part of our culture. That has been achieved over a long period – it has taken 15 years to get here – but considering environmental impacts is now second nature to our staff. There is also a commercial upside as you build respect from customers and people will want to do business with you, and repeat business as well.

Can you give an example of these commercial upsides?
Last year we brought out Adnams East Green - the first carbon neutral beer in the UK. Tesco came to us and said "could you make a carbon neutral beer?" I've no doubt they came to us because we had the credibility and the [low carbon] infrastructure in place. Now we are using barley and hops grown in Suffolk for the beer, we brew it at our brewery, which has a very low carbon output, put it into lightweight bottles, and distribute it through our green distribution centre. We keep emissions as low as possible, then offset the remaining emissions at a cost of half a pence a bottle with the whole process verified by the Carbon Trust. We've seen a lot of interest in the product and we are now investigating taking more carbon out of the process and trying to make the whole thing carbon neutral without offsets.

For mid-sized businesses on a similar scale to Adnams it is often difficult to justify green investments, particularly in the current economic climate. How do you make a case for these types of projects at a time when budgets are tight?
It is very easy to go down the cost cutting route and the problem is that some of these types of initiatives do have larger costs up front. But if you believe you will be in business in the long term, you get the rewards in the long term. We could have built a standard steel distribution centre, but we measured the proposal against our values and realised the energy and emissions would be highe r and we should go with the greener option.

From a commercial perspective how do you maintain those values when a business is under short term pressures?
It has to start at the top and you need the support of the shareholders. If they just want to maximise quarterly profits then they are not going to go on this journey. And I know I keep saying this, but it has to be embedded within the whole organisation and needs buy in from everyone so environmental considerations are included in all projects. So many initiatives fail when you bring in a CSR director and they try to overlay sustainability onto existing plans.

About Jonathan Adnams

Jonathan Adnams, OBE, became Chairman of the Adnams brewery in Southwold, Suffolk in 2006, having been a member of the board since 1988.

He was recently awarded an OBE for his services to corporate social responsibility.