After two successful years of running ‘Sustainable September’ and ‘Green June’, this year we wanted to celebrate all the things we do around social issues too and decided to hold ‘ESG Month’. With sustainability being one of our four strategic pillars, it’s crucial to engage staff in every aspect of our commitment to becoming a net-zero business by 2030. Our people are also the heart of ILG so incorporating social aspects, such as volunteering, donating to charity and Pride into this engagement month was important for 2024.
What did we get up to during ESG month?
We kickstarted the month with Volunteers Week from 3rd- 9th June, where we encouraged staff to volunteer for a cause they care about most, with paid time off during work hours. At ILG, we believe in giving back to our local communities, fundraising, supporting charities and working hard to protect the environment.
On Wednesday 5th June, we promoted World Environment Day, and this year’s focus was on Land Restoration, Desertification & Drought Resilience. Find out more here.
New for this year was ‘Wear Your Best Bargain Day’ where we celebrated second-hand shopping and encouraged staff to wear their best pre-loved bargain buys!
10th-16th June was ‘Bike Week’, the UK’s biggest awareness-raising moment of the year for cycling and a chance to celebrate. We took time to remind our colleagues of all the positives that riding a bike can bring to our own health and wellbeing, as well as the wider impacts on our communities and the planet.
With June being Pride month globally, we celebrated all month long, with a dedicated Pride Day on 27th June. We celebrate Pride Day annually at ILG and dress in bright colours and bring in tasty bakes to share. Each site decorates their communal areas with Pride flags and we celebrate diversity and build relationships between colleagues.
Another annual awareness day we celebrated this month was Clean Air Day which took place on Thursday 20th June. Clean Air Day is the UK’s largest air pollution campaign, bringing together communities, businesses, schools and the health sector. On Clean Air Day, we encourage our staff to look at their usual habits and perhaps replace these with more environmentally-friendly alternatives, such as walking to work instead of driving and getting out in the fresh air. Take a look at some of our team at Salfords holding their morning briefing outside:
Giving back to our local communities
A crucial part of our ESG strategy is giving back to our local communities and every year we pick two charities to support throughout the year with different fundraising activities. As part of ESG month, our generous clients contributed donations of stock for our staff to buy, with all proceedings going to Turning Tides and The Hope Centre. The donations included a variety of items such as clothing, beauty products, accessories and electronics, and were all priced between £1 and £10.
This year, the charity stock sale was a huge success and we’re proud to have raised over £7,500. Thank you to our wonderful clients for their kind donations and to our generous staff for continuing to support our local communities. We’re proud to have worked with our clients to ensure these items didn’t go to waste and were given a second life!
Walking to Plant Trees
We also took part in the Yusen Logistics YuMove Global Wellbeing Challenge. We tracked our daily steps and for every 100,000,000 steps, Yusen pledged to plant 10,000 trees (up to 50,000). All Yusen OpCo’s were invited to join across the globe, and our combined target of 500,000,000 was smashed by 525,149,803 steps. That’s over 105% steps more than the target! ILG participants racked up an impressive 12,439,105 of these steps! We’re thrilled to have contributed to 50,000 trees being planted through OneTreePlanted.org.
Congratulations to ILG’s top three participants: Letti Kis, Kamil Letkiewicz and Julie Ribano for their incredible efforts!
Welcoming the UKWA
Finally, and to round up ESG month, we welcomed Clare Bottle, Chief Executive of the UK Warehousing Association to ILG’s fulfilment centre in Salfords. As one of the UKWA’s 80 ‘2024 Year of Warehousing’ visits, we showed Clare everything we’re doing as part of our Zero-By-Thirty sustainability journey and gave her a tour of our three state-of-the-art warehouse units. It was a pleasure to host Clare as her visit number 49 of 80!
Want to find out more about what we are doing for ESG? Read our ESG e-book here >
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