Royal Victoria Place shopping centre, Tunbridge Wells has been awarded the internationally acclaimed Green Apple Award in recognition of its hugely successful best practice initiative, ‘Ready Steady Green’. The awards, operated by The Green Organisation, have become widely established as one of the major environmental recognition schemes both in the UK and internationally.
Ready Steady Green is a comprehensive sustainability programme which was developed by Royal Victoria Place in 2012 with the aim of achieving new targets and educating the centre’s stakeholders on the importance of waste recovery, recycling and energy consumption.
Within the last 18 months, the centre has exceeded its first target to recycle at least 60 per cent of waste, achieve zero waste to landfill as well as diverting all food waste to anaerobic digestion to create electricity. The centre has also achieved a 10% reduction in electricity and an 18% reduction in water usage.
Laurie Barton Wright Centre Manager for Royal Victoria Place explained; “Ready Steady Green has been a hugely successful project for the centre and with the support of our staff, retailers and customers we have been able to hit some very ambitious targets ahead of schedule.
“Recycling has moved from 28% to over 60% and we have seen real reduction in electricity consumption from power factor correction, voltage optimisation and PIR sensors. Water usage has dropped with better education and reducing tap flow times in public areas. We place a lot of emphasis on monitoring the impact we have as a business on the environment and we are also on track to achieve ISO14001 status by the end of the year.”
The Green Apple award follows a number of achievements for Royal Victoria Place in 2013, including recognition by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents for its approach to occupational safety and health in July and a BCSE Purple Apple Marketing Awards for its Royal Rocks campaign in May.
The centre management team will collect the Green Apple award at The House of Commons in London on 11th November 2013, with the potential to be selected to go on further to represent the country.