Case study: adam&eveDDB

When it comes to reducing their carbon footprint and making sure they are running their business in the most environmentally friendly way possible, adam&eveDDB have focused their efforts on 3 key areas:

Internal – looking at ways of working, how business is done day-to-day, dealing with suppliers, keeping buildings running and overall consumption. Key initiatives include:

• Partnering with First Mile to constantly assess their recycling programme through monthly reports, and ensuring that they continue to both reduce waste and recycle any waste that is produced. To date, adam&eveDDB recycle 86% of their total waste.
• Implementing energy efficient LED lighting across all 7 floors of their Paddington home.
• Ensuring heavy duty IT equipment and server capacity are energy efficient.
• Encouraging sensible use of printing through keycard access and deafult black & white printing across the building.

On top of initiatives across the building infrastructure, adam&eveDDB consistently review their internal café and food/beverage suppliers, regularly challenging them to ensure environmentally friendly sourcing. Most recently this has included:

• Replacing all plastic milk bolttes with reusable glass bottles – this equates to just over 28,000 bottles per annum, saving roughly 11,760kg of plastic (based on an average 42g/2L milk bottles).
• Replacing all takeaway cups with mugs and glassware, reducing annual use of Vegware takeaway cups from 56,500 to a couple of hundred.
• Removing over 25,000 single use plastics by ensuring snacks, tea bags, coffee and other similar supplies are purchased in bulk and provided to staff in glassware. (Single use plastics are likely to become a short-term solution to maintaining safe workplace practices during COVID-19, although adam&eveDDB will continue to reduce their use where possible. One example of this will be encouraging the purhcase of reusable/washable masks.
• Ordering all daily fruit supplies from Oddbox, a company who provide fresh fruit which is perfectly suitable to eat but would otherwise have been wasted
• Work closely with lunch and meal suppliers Feast Catering to continually provide balanced lunchtime options that come from sustainable sources. Some of their key environmental commitments include:
• Not using plastic in their packaging – everything they deliver is compostable.
• All of their deliveries are zero emissions using 100% electric vehicles or bikes.
• All of their salad, fruit and vegetables are supplied by Contry Supplies London and are sourced locally, while all of their meat is sourced from small UK farms rearing free-range native breeds.
• They regualrly update their menu throughout the year to use seasonable produce and reduce the food miles from every meal.

Employees – adam&eveDDB continually ask themselves what they can do to help the team stay informed and up-to-date about climate change, how they can share environmentally friendly habits, and ensure that staff understand the challenge and feel motivated to act.

One of the key ways this is achieved is through an annual Green Week where the company hosts speakers, and helps educate and motivate employees. The 2020 Green Week included:

• Three guest speakers who were invited to give 30-45 minute talks about the importance of climate change and what they were doing to help tackle this.
• In the lead up to Green Week the office also took part in Veganuary, serving only vegan food options to help encourage a more balanced diet. Across January around 1,840 vegan meals were served.
• Provided a number of discounted Keep Cup options to help further reduce the need for takeaway cups.
• Provided free bike maintenance and servicing to all cyclists across the agency to help reduce the reliance on cars/public transport and reward those who already cycle to work.
• Hosted a film evening screening a number of hard-hitting short films and documentaries that shed light on the wide-ranging impacts of climate change, and the lack of action to tackle these.

External – looking at how the agency can influence people beyond their own organisation, both through the creative product and how it is produced.

Over the past three years adam&eveDDB has worked alongside Green Screen (an environmental and sustainability consultancy) on 213 of their productions, in 20 countries to evaluate and identify where they can work with clients and production partners to make sure they are as environmentally responsible as possible. In the process, Green Screen have also trained 137 Green Stewards to implement and oversee sustainability measures on their film and stills shoots.

More recently adam&eveDDB has worked alongside the Advertising Association to launch AdGreen; a set of services and tools which will help the advertising industry first to measure and then to reduce its carbon footprint.

Finally, as part of their approach to identify opportunities beyond their day-to-day operations they have partnered with Urban Bees to install beehives on the roof of 12 Bishops Bridge Road. This initiative not only allows the agency to make a small contribution to the protection of a fundamental species, but it’s also a great way to involve and educate our wider agency team though ‘Meet the Bees’ sessions provided by the team at Urban Bees.