Chelsom Goes Green
An environmental consultancy programme funded by the European Regional Development Funding and managed by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) is helping Chelsom to reduce carbon emissions in a bid to make their headquarters more environmentally friendly.
Chelsom is a third-generation family business with over 70years experience designing and manufacturing high quality decorative lighting for the international hotel and marine industries, supplying both standard and custom lighting to the most luxurious hospitality and marine brands in more than 70 countries across the globe with exports accounting for more than half of all sales. Recently awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade for the second time in three years, the family company is growing at a phenomenal rate, achieving a 59 per cent rise in international sales since 2017.
However, for Managing Director Will Chelsom, the company’s growing influence also meant a growing carbon footprint, and he required specialist support to make Chelsom Ltd more environmentally friendly.
Referral leads to carbon savings survey
After taking part in a Low Carbon Innovation Forum, Will set up an Environmental committee within the company and pledged to attempt to reduce the business’s carbon footprint. After approaching the University of Central Lancashire’s Making Carbon Work (MaCaW) programme, a team of energy auditors visited Head Office and assessed the potential ways that Chelsom could reduce emissions and save money on bills. The assessment included a basement audit of Chelsom’s current carbon output and potential improvements, resulting in a consolidated list of recommended actions to reduce their carbon footprint through adopting some new behavioural changes and equipment purchases.
Findings to reduce emissions and energy bills
In Chelsom’s case, a range of recommendations including installing solar panels, improving thermostats and timers for the main heater and converting on site lighting to LEDs was estimated to offset company carbon output by over 10 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. In addition, the recommended actions should also see the company make significant savings on annual energy costs.
However, for Will Chelsom, the saving is about more than just money:
“We are trying to expand our horizons as a greener company and the team at MaCaW have been helping us move from an idea to actual plans that can make us a more environmentally friendly company. While we have intentions to offer greener solutions to our clients in the long term, I felt it was important that we were able to get our own house in order and apply some environmentally friendly measures to our own headquarters first. The team at MaCaW were very knowledgeable and helpful and were able to quickly assess areas where they thought we could improve and explain how each measure could not only reduce our carbon footprint but also lower our energy bills and make us a more prospective operator to our clients. For the hospitality industry, becoming more environmentally friendly is extremely important and by taking strides to reduce our own emissions we can explain to our clients that the carbon footprint throughout the supply chain is lower with us when we bid for work.”
MaCaW is a University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) project, an industry and academic collaboration funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) alongside UCLan, and supported by Boost; Lancashire’s business growth hub.
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