Carbon Negative Status

Following the UN’s devastating report on the impact of human activity on our climate, Blue Rock have been looking into how we can further decrease our environmental impact, and also how we can help our customers reduce their carbon footprint.

With the Construction Leadership Council introducing ConstructZero, the Builders Merchants Federation Ltd committing to zero carbon operations, and the government’s Net Zero by 2050 10-point plan, this is a big topic in the builders merchant industry.

By calculating and offsetting our carbon footprints, we can reverse the impact that we have on climate change.

If we can achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, we can limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius (the threshold the IPCC suggests is safe and is laid down in the Paris agreement).  

“For decades, my team and I have been helping customers reduce their carbon impact through the use of our software systems. To be fair, we achieved this as a side effect of making our customers more efficient – less paperwork, less travelling, less returns and less waste by providing world class software tools to calculate recommended stock levels. The “green agenda”, historically, wasn’t the driver for this but it is now as we are a component within the construction materials industry and we have to play our part, albeit small. Not only will Blue Rock continue to innovate and bring innovation to our merchant and distribution customers to help them cut their carbon footprint but we will also play a direct part to account for our own effect on the environment.

Blue Rock had started to adopt electric vehicles a few years ago and will continue doing so. We produce virtually no paperwork, and any sent to us is digitised and then recycled. The majority of our team works, where possible, from home which has a dramatic effect on our use of fossil fuels and even moving our own servers into our hosting centre has had a net reduction in energy consumption and saved a considerable monthly electric bill. But it wasn’t enough…

Blue Rock have just been awarded a Carbon Negative status, and we believe that if our customers and industry strive for this then so should we and as a result we can reverse our impact on climate change in 2021, and many years to come.

It is far simpler for a software house like ours to become Carbon Negative than a distributor and merchant of construction materials, but I would hope that our action would send a message to our software colleagues and competitors in this industry to do the same.”