Great wines and fantastic customer service are the watchwords at Ellis Wines, but we are also passionate about doing the right thing and with sustainability at the forefront of everybody’s minds, we continually strive to improve on all areas of our business to further reduce our impact on the planet and head towards a more sustainable future.

We are proud to announce that as of July 2023 we have become a Carbon Neutral business.

To complete the project, we partnered with Carbon Footprint, a consultancy specialising in carbon offsetting. This vast project involved assessing the company’s GHG emissions which are split into scopes 1, 2 and 3.

• Scope 1 covers emissions from anything we directly own, such as our vans, which we are working hard to reduce by converting to electric vehicle options.
• Scope 2 covers emissions from the energy we purchase, of which is all from renewable sources.
• Scope 3 emissions are from sources we are indirectly responsible for. After measuring Scope 1 and 2, we decided to go above and beyond by looking at areas within scope 3, including remote working and commuting, outsourced UK customer deliveries, business travel, electrical equipment, waste, water and paper use.

Recommendations were made and goals were set for us to achieve a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 and a 90% reduction by 2045.

As part of the future generation, the project was headed up by Holly Ellis and Angus Ellis. “We are really pleased to achieve carbon neutral status and to have taken further steps to look after our planet, supporting our promises to do the best we can. The data gathering process was vast but, it opened our eyes as to where we can improve and confirmed to us that we have a number of great processes in place already. The engagement from our staff was also reassuring, to know that they share the same views as we do. As the future generation of a family-run company, this has even more resonance for us.”

We chose two great projects to invest in to offset the GHG emissions and details about these can be found below.

Reforestation of Degraded Land by Mtpl in India

The project involves carbon sequestration of degraded lands through reforestation activities. Many discrete parcels of degraded land that are owned by small and poor farmers/tribal who do not have the capability of plantation without any external financial support and technical guidance are reforested under Farm Forestry Scheme. The project encompasses 12,437 parcels of land measuring 14,969.46 hectares owned by 12,002 farmers distributed in seven districts across three states Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, majority being in Odisha which constitutes almost 83% area of the project, 14% in Andhra Pradesh and only 3% in Chhattisgarh.

Promoting Improved Cooking Practices in Nigeria

The project activity involves replacement of existing in-efficient cookstoves being used by majority of Nigerian population with highly efficient Toyola Cookstoves.

Over 71% of Nigeria’s population, mainly poor people, cook with solid fuel in inefficient traditional cookstoves and open fires resulting in serious indoor air pollution. Due to this, Nigeria records the highest number of indoor air pollution related deaths, averaging 64,000 annually, especially amongst women and children in poor families (Source: Clean Cooking Alliance). This is why Toyola Cookstoves are primarily targeted at the majority, the poor part of the population.

From the initial concept, women have been the driving force of this project. The problems of rudimentary stoves affect women disproportionately as they carry out the greater part of cooking and child-rearing activities, which centre around the kitchen and the hearth. By enlisting the help of female Community Agents, women have been empowered with new information, new skills and ownership of a new asset. The stove is made available to both men and women equally.