Painting a greener business future

Tony Hill, Operations and Compliance Manager at Gemini ARC Nuneaton, explains how operating sustainably can bring both business and environmental gains.

“We never set out to be deliberately green but the more we looked at ways to be more efficient as a business, the greener we became.” Tony works with Gemini Arc, a network of highly efficient and professional bodyshops with over 20 years of experience within the industry. In 2019, Gemini Arc won the National Body Repair Association (NBRA) Platinum Level Greener Bodyshop Award, in recognition of their continued environmental initiatives. “We are very proud to have won NBRA award. It’s one of the first awards of its kind to be offered by the NBRA and is a testament to the efforts we have made as a business to be more sustainable. “Our starting point within the business is to look at what we have a statutory obligation to do such as Health and Safety Regulations and VOC standards.

We then look to raise the bar from there, so we are operating at a more specialist level. This approach helps to set us apart in the sector and deliver even greater efficiencies within the business. “Our intelligent repair process is a good example of how we do this. By working with the right insurance partners we have gone against the industry practice of over repairing to focusing on making the repair smaller.

In doing so, we are able to reduce our purchase and use of essential repair elements such as wet goods, dry goods, parts and packaging, all of which overall minimises the environmental impact of each repair. We have done the same with other areas of the business, where again we have rejected the industry norm in favour of a more efficient process. For instance, we use a single track, one oven system, rather than the conventional three, to help reduce gas and electric usage.

Further initiatives we have introduced include compacting and segregating all our waste, which has in quarter two alone this year enabled us to divert 96% of our waste from landfill. We have also partnered with Octopus EV support, so that we can now offer an electric courtesy car to our customers.

For the future, our plan is as much about looking at what we could be doing as what we are doing. We want to keep building on what we have already achieved, as it will ultimately not only make the business more sustainable but more profitable as well.