Earth Day is an annual global event with a mission to ‘diversify, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide’. Established in 1970, today EarthDay.org claims to be the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement, working with more than 150,000 partners in over 192 countries.
The theme for Earth Day this year is Invest in Our Planet.
At Mushroom Producer Organisation we are committed to doing our bit to invest in the planet and make our production processes more sustainable. Not only is this better for the planet, but it’s better for our growers. In the last year we’ve taken steps to reduce our carbon emissions and to get more value from the resources we use by investing significantly in new environmental actions.
These investments have allowed us to support our members in decreasing their environmental impact through reducing reliance on fossil fuels, lowering their carbon footprint, and improving energy efficiency.
In 2022 we invested 31.67% of our actual expenditure in the following initiatives.
Insulation and re-covering of tunnels
We invested in insulating and recovering a tunnel at one of our growers sites, J McCann Mushrooms. This has allowed for more cost-effective production, especially now that energy prices have increased substantially. We expect that this action will have a massive saving in heat loss of 54.5%, saving an estimated 7815.89KG of CO2 per year.
Installation of Solar Photo Voltaic (PV) panels
325kWp roof mounted solar PV system was installed on our site at Howden. This investment means that MPO is now able to generate renewable energy, reducing our reliance on power from the grid and the use of fossil fuels. Our carbon emissions and greenhouse gases per KG of mushrooms has been reduced, making our mushrooms an even more sustainable and planet-friendly food choice.
It is estimated 69,821 kgs of CO2 per year will now be averted due to this investment.
As a producer of a food that is inherently sustainable, healthy and local it’s only right that we do our bit and keep ourselves accountable. In 2023 we have already started to implement plans to invest more in environmental initiatives through our environmental programme, and plans are underway to re-cover more tunnels, upgrade more tunnels to LED lighting and invest in more solar PV systems.
