Genus Green Initiatives

During the COVID infested year of 2021 Genus kept busy with a raft of green initiatives to lower the impact of our activities on the environment.

We underwent a major refurbishment project in conjunction with the Coventry & Warwickshire Green Business Programme – Coventry and Warwickshire Green Business Programme | Coventry City Council This involved the following improvements:

• Every one of our 111 lights were replaced with LED lights, many of them on motion sensor timers
• All 29 of our windows were replaced with brand new PVC-u windows fitted with 28mm energy saving glass.
• Our 30-year-old boiler was replaced with a new Ideal 35Kw combination boiler
• Our aging air conditioning units in our Digitisation studios were replaced with new R32 refrigerant gas Panasonic inverter driven air source heat pump split system air conditioners

Genus owns both 15 and 16 Hammond Close. 16 Hammond Close houses all of the Solar Panels

The above initiatives, that were all installed by September 2021, are expected to save 7.92 tonnes of CO₂ being produced each and every year. Naturally everybody at Genus is very pleased with these achievements, especially when you combine them with the 180 solar panels on our roof that use a 45kVa system that has generated 33,500 KWh of solar electricity, on average per year, since their instalment in 2014 – that is 234,500 KWh of electricity in total, and still counting. All of this from sunny England!

However, at Genus we still want to strive to lessen our impact on the environment. That is why we are really pleased to announce that for 2022 we have joined the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Club (FBHVC) and Tree-V’s Automotive Carbon Balancing scheme – www.trees.fbhvc.co.uk. This scheme allows us to capture the CO₂ created by our fleet of 8 vehicles every year. The scheme sees trees planted and maintained on our behalf to capture our vehicle’s CO₂ emissions. Genus has chosen Future Carbon Capture which brings a wealth of other environmental benefits, not just new woodland! For example, new woodlands improve biodiversity and help with flood mitigation. Thanks to our financial contributions we will be carbon capturing 35.7 tonnes of CO₂ and balancing our annual vehicle mileage thanks to the planting of 107 trees. Details of our Tree-V’s specific Carbon Units can be found on the UK Carbon Land Register and our trees are verified and monitored by Forest Carbon who lead the way in UK woodland and creation for carbon capture. The quality of Forest Carbon’s schemes are assured by the UK Government’s Woodland Carbon Code and the IUCN’s Peatland Code.

While the headline news story around the world in 2021 was COVID, in Nuneaton we like to think that we made our own little mini headline for the small amount of work we have done to lower our impact on the environment. Everybody can do their own little bit. Digitising or microfilming your documents means that your clients or your staff can access those documents digitally from anywhere in the world, removing the need for your staff to commute and for your clients to travel to see your collections. It also has the extra bonus of protecting your valuable original documents, as only the digital versions are used for access. We all want to reach net-zero one day but the path to that goal requires some small steps first.