A day in the life: Ross Taylor - ESG Coordinator

I am the ESG Coordinator at Future Biogas and began my journey here in 2021. This role was created to further enhance the ESG arm of the business. I work within the Business Development team and my role is cross functional, incorporating multiple business areas including sustainability, planning, operations, and health and safety.

This diversity provides the opportunity to work with lots of Future Biogas’ great people across all areas of the business and gain an insight into their roles. This also leads to contrasting work streams and requires a broad skillset. Often technical skills are involved within the environmental and governance side but softer skills on the social side. However, these differing areas are equally crucial and work in unison to embed ESG practically into the day-to-day operation at Future Biogas.

The building blocks of the ‘environmental’ section of ESG at Future Biogas are borne out of tangible works that we implement on our sites and our day-to-day operational working.

On site, we’re always searching for ways to improve our environmental performance. One of our target areas is biodiversity and we have site-specific biodiversity management plans in place that outline native planting schemes and continual biodiversity improvement.

We provide key performance indicators (KPIs) on a monthly basis, recording and reporting upon environmental and sustainability performance for each site. This involves monitoring and measuring a host of site data that have an environmental output (e.g. Propane, diesel, and electricity consumption).

The data we report feeds into calculating our own operational carbon footprint that is accredited against the standard ISO 14064. From this point we can analyse the data further and understand areas where we can reduce our impact.

I also work as part of the wider sustainability team, which involves collaborative projects such as improving carbon literacy among employees and the company sustainability strategy.

Becoming a force for good in the local communities in which we operate is key to our ESG strategy. This involves community funding schemes across all of our sites.

We often try to steer groups in a direction that is also close to FB’s work. E.g. Biodiversity enhancement, environmental improvement and energy efficiency. We try to play an active role in the grants we give to local groups, often visiting and taking part in various community-led events.

In the last 10 years FB has invested over £350,000 in local communities, projects and charitable causes. Further to this I assist the planning team as they begin to roll out potential new developments at public consultation events explaining the process and purpose of AD developments.

We also have social KPIs related to individual sites, which include factors such as health and safety (e.g. accidents, incidents, near misses reported), diversity and employment figures.

These are recorded on a monthly basis; H&S in particular is a crucial KPI as it is a core business value of ours, underlining our commitment to ensure that everyone involved in our operations is safe to work.

A robust approach to governance is the backbone of ESG at Future Biogas. Governance refers to policies such as environmental, sustainability, and health and safety. These policies inform our day-to-day operation and ensure that we adopt best practice across the business and are compliant with the rules and regulations for our industry.

Our accreditations such as ISO 9001 (Quality), 14001 (Environmental) and 45001 (Health and Safety) demonstrate not only our commitment to meet these standards but that we continually strive for improvement.