By Victoria Page, Made in Britain Green Growth Programme Manager
It’s been a whirlwind of a year for the Green Growth Programme. We would like to welcome all the new members that have joined our cohort, and for those of you that are yet to join, I hope that 2023 is your year.
The landscape for manufacturing continues to prove tricky, with turbulent economic and political challenges affecting the supply of raw materials and the rising cost of energy. And yet, we know these challenges are not insurmountable because we have seen so many stories this year of businesses that have thrived, despite the threatening market conditions.
A theme that resonated last year for me, is the growing appetite for manufacturers to embrace sustainable business, making significant changes to their businesses as part of their commitments, such as moving to renewable energy, building new, more sustainable factories and premises, and collaborating more widely with the Made in Britain membership to source and sell more.
As part of that growing interest, we made the decision mid-year to embed the Green Growth Assessment into the main Made in Britain member area, allowing every member the chance to complete the free assessment easily, and better understand their sustainability progress. Each member that completes the assessment is awarded the Green Growth Programme badge, which can be used across internal and external communications. The Green Growth Programme provides practical tools and resources for members wherever they are on their sustainability journey, to make progress faster and become more sustainable.
Before Christmas, we celebrated our inaugural Made in Britain Impact Awards, to commend those businesses who are promoting and prioritising doing business sustainably. My huge congratulations to those businesses who were awarded one of the beautiful Dartington Crystal bowls. I hope they have taken pride of place in your reception areas. The awards were so successful, that we’ll be hosting them again this year, with a wider remit to celebrate more of Made in Britain’s members and their work.
Last year we also ran an informative webinar series, for members and non-members, to stimulate conversation and build connections within our industry sectors. You can read more about each webinar via the Green Growth News pages. We’ll be continuing the series in 2023, working with established media titles to host each webinar and hearing from manufacturers, as they share their stories, advice and commentary on what it means to be a sustainable business. If you’re interested in taking part in one of our webinars, please email us at green@madeinbritain.org
As we roll into 2023, just seven years remain until we reach 2030, the deadline for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Achieving these goals mean we can avoid the worst of the catastrophic climate change that will affect our lives on Earth as we know it. Our collective responsibility as manufacturers to deliver on SDG12, to ensure sustainable consumption and production, has never been greater. We still have time, and, thankfully, we now have a growing number of manufacturers to learn from about what it means to be a sustainable business and how to put that into practice.
I hope to see many more of you join the Green Growth Programme in 2023, engage with our content and webinars and share your progress. Together, we are changing the manufacturing sector for good, one product at a time.
By Made in Britain 1 year ago | By Made in Britain