Green(e) Kings: Brewers to offer EV charging at 900 of their pubs

Brewery and pub company, Greene King, is planning to install electric vehicle charging points at 900 of their managed pubs over the next year. From their 2,700 managed or tenanted pubs across the UK and working in partnership with RAW Charging and Drive Energi, they will select the 900 most suitable sites.

The process began on August 3rd at The Churchill, Royal Wootton Basset in Wiltshire and Greene King say it is part of their “commitment to support greener thinking and the company’s sustainability strategy”. It anticipates the increased demand for electric cars which should ramp up with the ban on new diesel, petrol and hybrid cars due to become law by 2035 at the latest.

Tony Abbott from Greene King pointed out Greene King’s efforts to “build a greener business”.. In April, they announced that they had diverted all waste from their businesses away from landfill sites. This had been achieved through expanding their waste recycling backhaul scheme, investment in infrastructure to more easily identify and segregate recyclable materials and investing in delivery fleets to grow their recycling schemes.

In September of last year, the organisation signed up to Food Waste Reduction Roadmap – a scheme managed by efficiency experts WRAP – to set a food waste reduction target which would be monitored and to engage with customers to advise on how to avoid food wastage. At that stage, the scheme was estimated to have mitigated the wastage of 53,000 tonnes of food in the UK over the previous 12 months.

Greene King also committed to Step Up to the Plate, a DEFRA project designed to highlight changes which will reduce food wastage. In addition, they launched a partnership with a food redistribution app, Too Good To Go, which accords users the opportunity to buy leftover food at discounted prices at the end of each day.

The green credentials of Greene King are clearly impressive and the latest initiative is indicative of an astute awareness of how they can align themselves to the growing electric vehicle market.