Our environmental strategy

As a leading provider of supply chain solutions, we recognise that we have a pivotal role to play in bringing goods to market, which brings with it a responsibility to increase the environmental sustainability of our own operations and those of our customers.
We are actively taking responsibility for the impact our business has on the environment, and making it a clear priority for our future success. In order to increase our environmental sustainability we are creating new products and services that help us and our customers enhance environmental performance.
Our environmental strategy sets out how we will work towards continuous improvement in environmental performance and we are looking forward to discussing with our partners how we can collectively contribute to tackling the wider issues of climate change and sustainability.
The strategy identifies five key result areas each of which have measurable objectives and targets against which we are actively working. These five key result areas are:

• Energy use and climate change
• Waste and recycling
• Governance and management
• Performance measurement
• Progressive product leadership

Download our five-year group environmental strategy above

The environment as part of our culture

Wincanton's success is built around its people. Therefore, rather than tackle the environment as a business problem we have embedded it into our culture, with every initiative, however small, treated as a positive step towards the goal of an environmentally sustainable business. And company-wide, we have launched environmental focus groups to look at innovative ways to make a positive change.

Working towards an environmentally-conscious culture has included the following initiatives:

• Driver training to teach optimal fuel use and efficient driving skills
• Best practice guidelines on minimising carbon emissions
• Addition of electric vehicles to our fleet wherever practical
• Promotion of collaborative solutions and shared user services to our customers
• Site environmental audits and action plans for improvement
• A "bring your WEEE to work" initiative enabling all staff to dispose of old electrical and electronic equipment at work
• Car sharing databases

Corporate responsibility

Our responsibility to our staff

Wincanton is a socially responsible employer. We endeavour to treat all our staff with respect and courtesy, providing them with a safe and stimulating environment in which to flourish. We are committed to encouraging our people to fulfil their potential by providing a raft of skills and development training throughout their careers. We offer a comprehensive range of educative courses for our staff at all levels, from driver training and warehouse skills through to graduate and executive leadership programmes.
Their safety, health and welfare are also of fundamental importance to us. As well as a central heath and safety committee, chaired by the chief executive, we have sub-committees on risk management, workplace safety and rules & procedures, supplemented by local safety teams across the majority of our sites.

Our responsibility to our neighbours

With over 400 sites across Europe we have a lot of neighbours and we have a commitment to each and every one of them to minimise the impact we have on their lives. We actively encourage all our sites to get involved in the communities around them, whether its teaching local schools about road safety or raising funds for local charities, our staff are always keen to muck in and make a positive difference.
At a group level we support the global charity, Transaid, which works to improve infrastructure in Africa and the developing world. For Transaid our involvement ranges from the small: regular company-wide fund-raising days; to the medium: sponsoring Transaid’s 10th anniversary charity ball; to the large: regular Wincanton staff secondments to Africa to guide and teach local communities independent logistics skills.