Accelar amongst the winners at the Sustainability West Midlands 20th Birthday Awards
At the recently held Sustainability West Midlands 20th Anniversary Awards, Accelar’s Co-Founder Charlene Baker was presented with the ‘Adapting to Climate Change’ award on behalf of the business.
Left Image - Our Co-Founder, Charlene Baker (left), pictured with Greg Wood from Sustain IQ (right) Right Image - Our Associate Director, Clare Ollerenshaw (left), pictured with Denise Brinton from Stay Safe PPE (right)
The event, hosted at the IMAX Theatre in Birmingham, brought together like-minded individuals and organisations to share their approaches, with a look to spark fresh ideas to create a sustainable future across the region.
As an active member of Sustainability West Midlands Accelar contributed on a number of fronts including Clare Ollerenshaw who joined experts from the Worcestershire Local Enterprise Partnership, Transport for West Midlands and Birmingham City University on Panel 1 for a discussion on progress towards tackling climate change and levelling up across the region.
Accelar also sponsored the ‘Resource Efficiency’ stream award and Clare was pleased to present Denise Brinton from Stay Safe PPE with the award for their influential work in the healthcare sector, helping to reduce wase sent to landfill and carbon emissions. Here’s Denise’s take on the award:
“Our team here at Staysafe PPE is passionate about reducing the impact of unwanted PPE on our environment, so we are delighted at being presented the Resource Efficiency award by Accelar for our intervention in the destruction of re-usable PPE. For too long it has been treated as disposable, and single use when it is soiled, but it is manufactured to be used, washed, and re-used several times, and this is our core business. 75% of PPE we collect is washed, repaired and returned to be re-issued. End of life PPE is either shredded and re-purposed or collected for energy recovery from waste, so nothing we handle goes to landfill. Furthermore, the cost of washing and repairing is around 60% lower than new replacements.
With the bulk of PPE being produced in the Far East and Asia, the associated imported carbon footprint is in the region of 14.7 tonnes of CO2e for every tonne of textiles produced. Last year we saved around 1,000 tonnes of PPE from unnecessary destruction, and we hope this award will raise awareness so we can continue to promote the washing and re-using of PPE.”
The work which contributed to Accelar’s adapting to climate change award links to Accelar’s corridor-scale climate resilience tool which has been practicably applied across the Midlands. The tool is used to assess infrastructure networks to determine their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and provides a dashboard of impacts. In addition, the tool identifies opportunity areas, where co-investment in different infrastructure systems can improve climate resilience more cost effectively. Please get in touch with Charlene if you’d like to find out more about the climate resilience tool.
We’d like to congratulate all of the other award winners and thank to Sustainability West Midlands for keeping the region focused on achieving the 2030 Sustainability Roadmap. Also, we would like to give recognition to The Globe Foundation, who were nominated for the adapting to climate change award and Solihull Zero Wasters, who were nominated for the resource efficiency award.