The secrets behind Hawkhill’s low carbon emissions

Did you know that we started calculating our CO2 emissions as far back as 2019, before emissions calculators, when the whole thing was still in its infancy?

Even back then, we had a strong desire to do better!

We grew up in the forests surrounding Tervalampi lake in Vihti and lived in the area long before Nuuksio National Park was founded. We have watched its development from front-row seats.

In sparsely populated areas like this, each snowstorm is a display of nature’s power and a reminder to respect it. Here, you learn to enjoy the fruits of nature and live in symbiosis with it.

Over the years, we have felt a growing concern for nature and the relationship we Finns have with it. That’s why, in 2018, we made an addition to our company strategy: “Hawkhill, as a company, shall be used as a tool in the fight against climate change. By our own example, we will demonstrate that a thriving business and low emissions are not mutually exclusive.”

So, what have we done? The list is long!

Calculating your emissions gives you a good picture of your current situation but is only the first step. To find ways of actually starting to reduce them, you need to look at that picture carefully.

This is what we did. For example:

• We lowered the heating in our cabins and improved their insulation where possible. Customers responded to this extremely positively!
• We switched to fully electric vehicles and optimised our delivery routes.
• Regardless of what the choice we are making is, be it about materials, consumables or anything else, we go over the different alternatives carefully. We don’t automatically choose the cheapest option. Instead, we opt for the most environmentally friendly option, preferably a certified one.

What’s more, we have been offsetting the carbon footprint of our customers since 2019.

Before we calculated them, we were certain heating would be our biggest source of emissions. We were wrong; it was logistics! That’s why logistics is what many of our most significant measures have been focused on.

Customer-based emissions have fallen, but there’s still work to be done

Thanks to these and many more measures, we have managed to lower our customer-based emissions by about 30 per cent since 2019. That’s an achievement we’re proud of!

However, Hawkhill’s operations have expanded since 2019, and despite our hard work, our total emissions have only fallen slightly. To put it simply, our per-customer emissions have gone down, but the number of customers we serve has gone up.

In this respect, as always when it comes to sustainability, there is more work still to be done. We are aware that food is currently one of our greatest sources of emissions. To make things harder, calculating food-based emissions is also extremely complicated and difficult. However, despite the challenges, we are committing to cutting down on our food-based carbon emissions in 2023.

We would like to encourage our customers to favour our delicious plant-based menu items, the selection of which is constantly expanding!

Transparency is also a fundamental building block of sustainability. It’s one thing to say you’re doing something, it’s another thing entirely to prove it. We have collected the results of our emissions calculations in the chart below. More information about our measures to protect our environment and climate can be found on our Environment and Sustainability page.

You can also find out more on our Responsible Hawkhill page.