Latest news with #NetZeroTransitionPlan
Fashion United
01-08-2025
- Business
- Fashion United
El Corte Inglés targets "Net Zero" by 2050 with new sustainability plan
Madrid - El Corte Inglés, the Spanish department store group, has launched its new 2025-2030 Sustainability Master Plan, reaffirming its commitment to environmental responsibility. The plan is a comprehensive roadmap aimed at achieving "Net Zero" status by 2050, with a focus on minimizing the company's environmental impact and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across its entire value chain. The new strategy, which was presented to key stakeholders in February, is built on three main pillars: Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). Key environmental goals Central to the plan is the new Net Zero Transition Plan. By 2030, El Corte Inglés aims to source 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. By 2034, the company plans an absolute reduction of 51.5 percent in direct emissions (Scope 1) from its operations and a 12 percent reduction in value chain emissions (Scope 3). The long-term goal is to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, with an 88.2 percent reduction in Scope 1 emissions and a 90 percent reduction in Scope 3 emissions compared to 2022 levels. The company will focus on four key areas—real estate, purchasing, supply chain, and central services—to achieve these targets. Initiatives include electrifying its centres, promoting low-carbon purchasing, transitioning to low-emission transport vehicles, and encouraging sustainable mobility for employees. Social and governance objectives The plan also outlines ambitious social and governance goals for 2030. Socially, the company aims to become a market leader in sustainability for customers, position its own brands as a benchmark in sustainability, and collaborate with suppliers to mitigate ESG risks. It also plans to promote projects that generate shared value for society and make its facilities and websites accessible to all. On the governance front, the company will focus on increasing board involvement in sustainability, updating corporate policies, adapting non-financial reporting to new regulations, and digitizing sustainability information for better traceability and quality. El Corte Inglés also reaffirmed its commitment to the circular economy by participating in the launch of the Re-Viste textile waste recycling program and continuing its "Zero Waste" plan, which recovered over 95 percent of the waste generated in its facilities in 2024. In summary El Corte Inglés has launched a new 2025-2030 Sustainability Master Plan with the aim of minimising its environmental impact and achieving climate neutrality by 2050. The plan is structured around three main lines of action: environmental, social, and governance objectives, including a Net Zero Transition Plan to reduce energy consumption and decarbonise its entire value chain. El Corte Inglés will focus on the use of clean energies, low-carbon purchasing, low-emission logistics, the promotion of sustainable transport among its employees, and optimal waste management as the main levers for its decarbonisation. This article was translated to English using an AI tool. FashionUnited uses AI language tools to speed up translating (news) articles and proofread the translations to improve the end result. This saves our human journalists time they can spend doing research and writing original articles. Articles translated with the help of AI are checked and edited by a human desk editor prior to going online. If you have questions or comments about this process email us at info@
HKFP
15-07-2025
- Business
- HKFP
Climate crisis: HSBC exits Net Zero Banking Alliance
HSBC has withdrawn from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) following the departure of 17 other banks, according to a statement released last Friday. The UK banking giant was a founding member of the UN-convened alliance in 2021, which committed members to the transition to net zero and reaching goals laid out in the Paris Agreement. 'With this foundation in place, and as we work towards updating and implementing our Net Zero Transition Plan later in 2025, we, like many of our global peers, have decided to withdraw from the NZBA,' said HSBC in the statement. Net zero refers to a balance between the production and removal of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and attaining Net Zero is an internationally recognised goal in slowing down the progression of global warming. The 2015 agreement, adopted by 195 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference, underlined the need to achieve the target. String of departures HSBC added that they remained committed to achieving net zero by 2050: 'We continue to support customers in all sectors to make progress towards their individual decarbonisation plans, recognising that the transition to net zero is not linear or uniform across sectors, markets, and regions.' The move follows a string of departures from the alliance including six major US banks: Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase. Each exited following the election of US President Donald Trump. Trump signed an executive order in January to begin a process to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. When HKFP asked HSBC if there will be any external audit or monitoring of their new 2050 commitment, the bank did not respond. Nor did they reply when asked on Monday what environmental initiatives may be dropped as a result of the alliance withdrawal. However, a spokesperson for HSBC Hong Kong told HKFP that they 'remain resolutely focused on supporting our customers to finance their transition objectives and on making progress towards our net zero by 2050 ambition.'
AU Financial Review
12-07-2025
- Business
- AU Financial Review
HSBC exits banks' climate coalition abandoned by Wall Street
HSBC has left the world's biggest climate alliance for banks, which was rocked earlier in the year by an exodus of many of its largest members. HSBC said the Net-Zero Banking Alliance played an important role in helping develop frameworks for setting emissions-reduction targets. 'With this foundation in place, and as we work towards updating and implementing our Net Zero Transition Plan later in 2025, we, like many of our global peers, have decided to withdraw from the NZBA,' it added.
New Statesman
24-04-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
Wayne Robertson: 'The science is clear on the need for carbon capture'
Image: enfinium Wayne Robertson is chief commercial and strategy officer at enfinium, one of the UK's largest energy from waste operators. How is enfinium's work contributing to global climate goals? Today, enfinium is one of the UK's leading energy from waste (EfW) operators. This means we are already playing a significant and often under-appreciated role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Our core function is to prevent unrecyclable waste from going to landfill, which results in significant emissions savings. There are several reasons for this, including the avoidance of methane emissions, a very potent greenhouse gas, as well as displacing virgin emissions and other useful products we recover from material that would otherwise be thrown away into environmentally damaging landfill. In 2023 this meant that, net, we prevented over 450,000 tonnes of CO2e from entering the atmosphere as a business. As a sector, our objective to end the routine use of landfill is on the horizon. At enfinium, we are now looking at what we can do next to address emissions from the waste sector. This is where carbon capture and storage (CCS) comes in. Last year we announced our Net Zero Transition Plan, setting out our intention to invest £1.7bn to install CCS technology across all our six facilities in England and Wales. Crucially, not only will installing CCS fully decarbonise our operations, but it will see enfinium generate 1.2 million tonnes of high-quality, durable carbon removals every year by 2039. This is because half of the unrecyclable waste we process is biogenic material – such as food waste or contaminated card or paper – which has recently absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere in its lifetime. By capturing this carbon at our facilities and permanently storing this, we prevent it from returning to the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. Carbon dioxide removals (CDR) are not a nice to have, but a necessity to achieve net zero – this is according to the Climate Change Committee. In its latest advice ahead of the UK's seventh carbon budget, the CCC made clear that the UK needs over 35 million tonnes of engineered CDRs each year in order to reach net zero. This is where energy from waste can play a significant role in UK-wide decarbonisation efforts. Once one of the UK's largest sources of territorial greenhouse gas emissions in the late 1990s, the waste sector can become one of the largest sources of negative emissions in the 2030s. At enfinium we are already making progress on our plans at pace. Our Parc Adfer facility in North Wales has been put forward to the government to become a Track-1 project as part of the HyNet carbon transport and storage network and will, if successful, be online by 2030. Last year, we also deployed the UK's first carbon capture pilot plant on an EfW at our Ferrybridge 1 facility, capturing 1 tonne of CO2 per day and providing valuable data that will help in designing our full-scale capture plants. Which innovations will have the biggest impact in growing the sector? A common misconception is that CCS technology is new – but it has been around for nearly a century and there are many examples of commercial plants currently in operation. What is new is what we want to use it for. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Historically, carbon capture has been used by the oil and gas industry for what is known as enhanced oil has used amine-based solutions to capture carbon, which is then injected into depleted reservoirs to extract further oil. What we want to do is capture carbon and permanently store it to remove it from the atmosphere and prevent it from contributing to global warming. The technology is the same, but the purpose is very different. This means we need greater scale, and we also need to find ways to make this cheaper and thus more commercially viable. One part of this will be finding new ways to capture carbon that are more energy efficient, which will be achieved both through new technologies and greater scale. This includes installing a further pilot at our Ferrybridge facility, which will test what is known as metallic-organic framework technology – a different method of capture that we hope will be less energy intensive and more sustainable. This is just one example of many now taking place across the sector as industry seeks to innovate in this exciting and vital new space. What are the biggest challenges the CCS sector faces? The first challenge is one of infrastructure. Installing a carbon capture plant at one of our facilities is one thing, but then transporting and storing the captured CO2 requires significant shared infrastructure. Developing this infrastructure is where government can play a role – and the UK government is doing just that through its cluster programme. There will be many more emitters that would invest in CCS with the reassurance that they could get access to this infrastructure. There is also a financial challenge. CCS is expensive to build and operate. When we look at the current uses of captured carbon, such as enhanced oil recovery, or utilisation in products like the food industry, the economic model is clear – there is a product to sell at the end. What we want to do now, however, is capture carbon to keep it out of the atmosphere – is that a product people want to pay for? This leads to the third challenge, public perception. Yes, there are some who are sceptical about the role of CCS, but the science is clear on its need – particularly the need for engineered removals at scale, which our sector can provide. How important are public-private partnerships? There is already a lot of collaboration between the public and private sector on CCS, for example the cluster programme – which has the potential to deliver the first at-scale clusters in the world, this decade. In the waste sector there are other policy areas that will require collaboration between public and private bodies to navigate the complex challenge that is decarbonising society's unrecyclable waste. The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is being expanded to include the waste sector from 2028 (which will attach a new cost to fossil-derived emissions from EfWs). It is vital this is delivered in a way that can meaningfully drive decarbonisation while recognising the challenges in doing so. The ETS offers a real opportunity to support the roll out of CCS in the UK, but only if this is implemented in the right way. The public and private sectors share a vision of a UK CCS industry which will not only contribute to the UK achieving its climate goals but also to driving economic growth. The UK's natural offshore geology presents one of the best locations in the world for storing captured CO2, with the potential to unlock billions of pounds of investment and create tens of thousands of high-skilled jobs in the decades to come. This is an opportunity that we at enfinium are committed to help realise. This article first appeared in our Spotlight Energy and Climate Change supplement of 24 April 2025. Related
