Implementing circular action to help Brewers reach Net Zero

Establishing materials audits and developing a circularity strategy for Brewers Decorator Centres

The UK paint sector continues to have a significant emissions and waste footprint – generating 1.9MT of CO2e each year – despite concerted efforts across the industry in recent years to reduce materials waste (including the Resource Futures-managed Community RePaint paint redistribution programme).

Wanting to make progress in reducing the 55m litres of paint wasted each year across the sector, and keen to cement itself as a leading benchmark for paint sustainability, Brewers Decorator Centres set out a plan to quantify its sustainability performance and establish a baseline record that would enable ambitious, achievable and measurable targets to be set for the business.

Having started the journey by outlining a vision, mission and purpose and undergoing the PlanetMark certification process (which benchmarked the carbon footprint of waste across the company as 48.3t CO2e annually), Brewers had begun taking steps towards decarbonisation with activities focused on consuming less and eliminating waste, improving lives, and developing the next generation.

Brewers called upon Resource Futures to cast an expert eye over the initial draft of its sustainability strategy, with the aim of ensuring that there were no missing elements, that areas of focus were balanced and best practice was in play, and that the targets and commitments set out were suitably ambitious for achieving the company’s desired outcome to become a net zero carbon business by 2040. Working in close partnership, Brewers launched their sustainability strategy in 2022 with a clear timeline of action and a significant pledge to consume less and eliminate waste.

Consuming less and eliminating waste

To deliver on their consume less and eliminate waste pledge, Brewers took on board recommendations to carry out a detailed waste audit to understand their current material flows baseline and their most problematic hotspots.

The work carried out followed Resource Futures’ six-step ‘circular economy flexible delivery framework’. This structure provides businesses with a means of assessing and addressing its needs in a holistic manner, rather than tackling issues in isolation.

A materials audit plan was developed to establish a shared understanding of Brewers’ current situation, ambitions, ways of working and success criteria. The audit involved collating and reviewing existing data and the actions taken to date; this took various factors into account – including the different scales and natures of Brewers’ business operation, the development of its national distribution centre, procurement and sales, business- and staff-generated waste, associated actions, and management services – and resulted in an input-output materials flow map of operations which was used to develop an audit questionnaire.

Built with expert input from Resource Future’s Data team, the audit questionnaire covered general store operations, tinting machine activities, services and products packaging waste, stock waste, offices and other waste, use of bins and waste management.

Alongside this, a series of on-site materials audits were carried out by one of our experienced waste composition analysis experts, complete with visual inspections and staff interviews. This was carried out in collaboration with Brewers’ Sustainability Officer, providing the Brewers’ team with the in-house skills needed to undertake similar audits in future across a wider range of Brewers sites and enabling them to continue to log and report data consistently to track progress across time.

Once collated, the audit and questionnaire data were analysed by the Resource Futures team and, where appropriate, scaled up across the business to help identify hotspots. These were presented to Brewers’ staff at an ‘ideas workshop’ to aid in the generation of new ideas to help tackle focus areas.

Mitigating mis-tints

A key ‘hotspot’ that emerged was the problematic waste associated with tint waste, resulting not only from in-store mis-tints as well as customer returns.

Having identified this as an issue, Resource Futures carried out targeted market research to understand the wider extent of this issue across the UK paint sector. This included identifying the latest technological developments in this area, as well as performing a scan of the paint industry’s reports and ESG commitments to understand the extent of this problem and how, if at all, it was being addressed.

What is a mis-tint?

A mis-tint is a paint that has a different colour or finish than intended generated from bespoke colour tinting processes.

Mis-tints from stores can contribute to the high levels of unwanted paint in the UK. Reducing mis-tint through improving tinting practices and customer engagement could contribute to improving the sustainability of the paint industry. Recognising that mistakes happen, the safe and effective management of mis-tints through schemes such as Paintcare can also make a positive difference.

This research highlighted the presence of some promising innovative solutions around tint waste; it also demonstrated that this issue has been largely unaddressed across the sector, which could be addressed through cross-business collaborative action.

Developing an improved sustainability strategy

As well as identifying the key material and waste hotspot areas across the business, the findings from the materials audit were used to develop a clear timeline of action and how to measure impact.

From working closely with Resource Futures’ data experts, Brewers’ sustainability team now possesses the in-house knowledge and skills to undertake its own waste audits independently. This will be critical in ensuring that accurate, comparable measurements are being taken at regular intervals, and will allow Brewers to continually assess and adapt its operations towards achieving its Net Zero ambitions.

“We were very pleased with the support provided by Resource Futures. Providing a structure for the waste audit – and then being able to use the results to carry out further research and provide important insights on the specific issue of mistints – was a key highlight.”

Tim Betson, Environment and Sustainability Officer at Brewers Decorator Centres