The foundational commitment of our strategy is to be net-zero by 2045, with an interim target to have our operations net-zero by 2030. This is an area where we have made significant gains in the previous two years. Since the publication of our strategy, we have invested over half a million pounds in energy efficiency, increased our solar PV facilities to self-generate 13% of our power demand and started to procure exclusively green electricity to meet our remaining power demand. These actions have allowed Eakin Healthcare to reduce our climate impact efficiently where we have the direct facility to do so. This has resulted in our operational emissions reducing by two thirds which is equivalent to nearly 800 transatlantic return flights.

Furthermore, we have started to address our indirect climate impacts through the measurement of our ‘value chain’ scope 3 emissions. Although this is within its early stages, we have been able to estimate our value chain climate impact and start to engage with key suppliers. As most of our climate impact is within our value chain, it is crucial that we bring our supply chain on our journey. In 2023/24 we initiated and completed a supply chain scoring exercise with our top 50 suppliers. Eakin Healthcare now have an environmental benchmark on our supply base and a mechanism to continue scoring our supply chain into the future. We intend to repeat this exercise every three years to measure improvement and provide feedback so that our suppliers have a clear pathway to assist in our net-zero journey.

Finally, the previous twelve months has been an important development period for our sustainability lead team. This team represents a cross section of our business which enables Eakin Healthcare to put our customers, our products and processes firmly within any decisions that we intend to make. It also allows for pragmatic discourse on developing solutions to difficult problems and provides an efficient mechanism for monitoring our progress to plan and shape future annual plans in line with strategy. This is so important for Eakin as we start to move from the successes, we’ve had on reducing our direct impacts and start to concentrate our efforts on indirect impacts, i.e. our supply chain emissions and the end of life for our products and packaging.

Looking forward to the next twelve months we will continue to develop this function, collectively chart policies and procedures that embody sustainability into the fabric of the decision-making processes and maintain course on short term activities that will deliver further business and product improvements. I look forward to sharing our successes as we continue to strive to make our products and behaviours as sustainable as we can.