Chess has many green achievements under its belt, including being featured in HRH Prince Charles’ May Day speech in 2008, and to mark May Day 2009 Chess has successfully launched its new Carbon Offsetting service to all customers. To kick start the launch of the new service, Chess offset 61 tonnes of CO2.
This supports the pledges made at the May Day Summit by Chess’ chief executive, David Pollock, and human resources director and head of Chess Green Team, Anne Binnie: to measure and report its carbon publicly; to manage its carbon emissions; to work in partnership with suppliers to reduce carbon emissions; to encourage customers to take action of reducing their carbon.
Pollock stated: “Being part of the May Day Network is extremely important to Chess. For a small Alderley Edge based company, being mentioned by HRH Prince of Wales in his global broadcast, at last year’s May Day Summit was fantastic. The launch of our Carbon Offset Service is an important step towards our commitment. Anyone can use our web portal to calculator and offset their footprint. What’s more if you’re a Chess customer we pay 25% of your first years offset.”
Whilst the pledges were being made, back at the office Chess people took part in a number of events to promote the environmental message of the day. In fact, for many Chess people their efforts started before they even got to work. With the reward of a bacon sandwich beckoning, many found environmentally friendly alternatives of embarking on their daily commute; such as taking advantage of the bike to work scheme, walking or car sharing.
Chess people were encouraged to submit ideas to the Green Team of how Chess could add to its green credentials. The winning idea of using the local car garage to perform a ‘health check’ of peoples cars was awarded a ‘green goodie bag’. This included a cotton shopping bag, energy saving light bulbs, organic coffee and chocolate as well as some items from the local fair trade shop.