Ricardo plc Annual Report and Accounts 2022/23

We have shared our professional expertise through skills-based volunteering to the Green Schools Project to improve its carbon calculator tool which estimates the total greenhouse gas emissions arising from schools. This tool is used to benchmark schools against comparable counterparts, and acts as the starting point for the Green Schools Project’s Zero Carbon Schools programme, that educates pupils on sustainability and helps them to make change at school and at home.

The Ricardo London office’s social committee started out informally in 2021 in response to the lived experiences of working during the pandemic. Supported with funding by the senior leadership team in 2022, dependent on consistent attendance at events in London and Madrid offices, each month the social committee organises one to two events determined by the outcomes of regular surveys among the office teams. The committee will be supportive of any activities, so long as they are inclusive, and to date, the teams have taken part in bowling, sports, cinema-going and even creative arts – a recent art evening was attended by a least a third of people who do not usually attend office social gatherings.

Ricardo’s sustainability experts have been working with a leading home improvements retail company to reduce its supply chain carbon emissions and help it achieve its ambition of being emissions net positive by 2050.
The retail organisation has set ambitious climate goals, aiming to reduce carbon emissions in their upstream and downstream supply chain both from the goods and services they purchase and in the use of their products once sold.
As part of the project, Ricardo’s experts have delivered a product emissions inventory to identify emissions ‘hotspots’ which will become priority areas for action as well as life cycle analysis of products to inform the best ways to reduce carbon through product design, identifying both quick wins and longer-term strategies.