Creating, developing, and refining your Green Plan

. In a recent webinar held in association with HEJ, two speakers from business utility and sustainability consultancy, Inenco, explained the background to, and rationale behind, Green Plans, the key steps in creating an effective such plan, and some of the best ways to encourage staff employed in a wide range of roles to play their part in achieving the targets set. They also considered some of the practical and financial challenges to implementation, and how to overcome them.

Seeking to provide some clarity to healthcare estates professionals tasked with coordinating the creation and delivery of a Green Plan were Beth Goodwin, a Senior Account manager for Inenco’s NHS clients in the North of England, and David Oliver, Inenco’s Product and Insight manager, and a member of its ‘Solutions’ team, which delivers bespoke energy and sustainability services. The title of the webinar was ‘How NHS Trusts can turn compliance into an opportunity – by creating an effective Green Plan’.

Inenco, an ISO 14001-certificated organisation, is a business utility company with over 50 years’ energy and utility management experience, which in 2020 alone procured energy worth £86 million for NHS Trusts. In a brief introduction, I introduced the two co-presenters, gave a short overview of what they would cover, and highlighted a key point made by Inenco – that with health and social care activity currently contributing some 4-5 per cent of the UK’s carbon footprint, without greater focus on delivering environmental sustainability service-wide, the NHS’s recent ‘Net Zero Carbon’ commitment could be ‘in peril’.