Companies large and small honoured at 2degrees Champions Awards

Leading collaboration platform and service for sustainable business with over 48,900 members 2degrees held its popular, peer-voted Champions Awards at Porchester Hall in London recently.

Estelle Brachlianoff, senior executive vp UK & Ireland of Veolia, was crowned leader of the year at this year’s 2degrees Champions Awards.

After joining Veolia in 2005 as special advisor to the CEO of waste management, Brachlianoff has risen through the organization, becoming managing director of cleaning services and prior to her current position, was in charge of waste management in the Greater Paris area. Over the last year she has overseen a number of initiatives and achievements including the integration of Veolia’s sister company Dalkia into the UK group - a move that will enable the company to offer its customers a wider range of environmental services in the areas of energy, water, waste and recycling - and Veolia receiving a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Sustainable Development, the UK’s highest accolade for business success.

In the Energy & Carbon Management – Short-Term Payback category, intu’s Alan Richardson won recognition for the company’s achievement in reducing like-for-like 2011 carbon emissions in their shopping centre 30% by the end of last year. This has been done with investment in both financial terms with a £7m LED re-lamping project and the instigation of an energy manager network across its shopping centres.

And in the Energy Management Solution category, Wayne Sharpe’s efforts at Carbon Trade Exchange (CTX) won top plaudits. Sharpe, chairman and founder of CTX, has devoted himself to bridging the nexus between financial markets and the environment, creating marketplaces and platforms that make it simple, secure and transparent for finance to achieve environmental outcomes. He designed the technology and infrastructure and led the development of the innovative platform, based on Microsoft Azure cloud technology.

B&Q won Innovation of the Year with its easyGrow™ with Teabag Technology™, a groundbreaking innovation for bedding plants that is peat free and resource efficient.

Beyond the environmental benefits, easyGrow also addresses the needs of B&Q customers – simpler, risk-free gardening and better blooms, from responsibly sourced products which don’t harm the environment; and an end to messy, difficult to recycle, expanded polystyrene waste.

The New Building award went to Bristol City Council’s Filwood Green Business Park, a focus for regeneration and enterprise in South Bristol. The brownfield site had contained an aircraft hangar which had left an area of concrete hard standing, asbestos contaminated soil and the possibility of unexploded ordnance dating from WW2. As well as transforming the environment, the project has already created over 20 new jobs and provided training opportunities for local people.

The National Trust’s Plas Newydd Marine Heat Pump project won the Property Retrofit award. Due to its size and location, the mansion was identified as the largest consumer of oil out of the National Trust’s entire estate. It now uses a 300kw open-source marine heat pump, the largest in the UK - drawing heat from seawater through a heat exchanger to transfer the latent heat from the sea to the mansion’s hot water systems.

The Strategic Energy Management award went to Barfoots of Botley, a farming business which generated 100% of its onsite energy requirement by making use of its 20,000 tonnes of green waste per annum.

Congratulations went to Unilever for winning the Best Internal Engagement trophy and also the Zero Waste category for its Zero-Non-Waste-to-Landfill programme.

Top honours in Corporate Reporting went to Pukka Herbs and Responsible 100. Pukka is a founding member of the Responsible 100 reporting initiative and has been actively involved in supporting its development to improve its own practices as well as encouraging others to do the same.

A full list of winners is available here.