The Swift Route to Sustainability: The Power of a Green Team to achieve Bronze Accreditation

Swiftool Precision Engineering Ltd is part of the SPE Group and is a first choice vendor to a global customer base supplying safety critical parts to the nuclear, petrochemical, and more recently aerospace markets.

Key Highlights

• SPE achieved excellent resource reduction in water (7%), diesel fleet fuel (24%) and general waste (57%)
• The introduction of 10 electrical vehicle charging bays ready for the EV purchasing policy and a targeted plan to reduce energy usage across both factories
• Working with suppliers to reduce the environmental impacts of transportation resulting in 5.74 tCO₂e p.a. saving

How did they do it?

Swiftool found that with their growing business day-to-day pressures, utilising a support organisation like iiE was the most convenient and cost-effective way to help steer their sustainable activities. The use of iiE’s structured approach helped Swift Tool Precision understand their environmental impacts, and implement processes to continually record and monitor improvement activities.

Against the backdrop of a growing order book, rising raw material costs and post Covid recovery pains, Swiftool Precision Engineering launched its Six Steps Sustainability Plan.

1. Transportation & Vehicles
2. Building Insulation
3. Supplier Partnership Program
4. Renewable energy options
5. Product and Packaging Waste
6. Heating and Lighting

The importance of a Green Team

Environmental awareness is demonstratively strong at Swiftool but the development of the Six Steps Sustainability plan enabled a structured approach to move the program at a faster rate.  After speaking with their iiE Support Officer, they realised the importance of a Green Team. The formation of the ‘Green Team’ allowed Swiftool to sub-divide the improvement activities under 4 activity areas:

• Office areas, recycling waste streams and mini-projects
• Facility development and companywide internal improvement project support
• Factory waste stream control, and
• Electricity usage reduction activities

The Green Team at Swiftool also created an environmental aspects register to identify and understand the key activities of the organisation that impact the environment in order to inform action plan development. The organisation has also implemented processes to collect and review data on a monthly basis in order to review performance and inform initiatives to achieve reduction targets.

Initial activities included switching to a green energy supplier, implementing a switch-off campaign to reduce energy across both factories, introducing paperlite initiatives and the introduction of Waste Control Points with named owners in the business, to increase awareness in the wider team and reduce waste contamination.

Impacts

The processes within the iiE programme fit with their normal working methodology (utilising the Plan-Do-Check-Act, for example, for quality assurance) and the organisation’s efforts were recognised in December 2022 when SPE achieved Bronze Level iiE Accreditation.

Peter Tack, the Non-Executive Director and Environmental champion states, “We have achieved real momentum in developing a companywide Environmental awareness program. The creation of ‘The Green Team’ who are personally committed to reducing our Carbon Emissions has enabled the company to fight on a number of fronts simultaneously to lower our impacts”.