Welcome to the ITV Green Team Blog takeover!

By Matt O’Shea, Group Technology Platforms Director, and ITV Green Team, Technology Chair

“No-one can do everything, everyone can do something, together we can do anything.”

This week is Zero Waste week across the UK. A campaign designed to help households, businesses, schools and community groups increase recycling, reduce landfill waste and participate in the circular economy. As part of Zero Waste week, our ITV Green team* will be taking over the ITV Technology blog to tell the story of what we’re doing at ITV to reduce our environmental impact, and how new technologies can help us get there.

At ITV, our social purpose has never been stronger. We recognise we’re experiencing a climate crisis, and that every business must do its part to keep our planet within safe limits of warming according to global climate science. That’s why, last month, we set ambitious 2030 environmental targets for the areas most material to our business — our carbon emissions, waste, sourcing and sustainable culture.

Using 2019 as a baseline, our environmental targets are outlined as follows:

Reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions by 46.2% by 2030

We aim to reduce scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 46.2% by 2030, scope 3 emissions by 28% by 2030, and power the business with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Our emissions targets will be approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative, and we will also join RE100, this year.

100% Sustainable Supply Chain by 2030

As part of our ambition towards running a 100% sustainable supply chain, 100% of our highest environmental risk suppliers will meet ITV’s best practice sustainability criteria by 2025, and by 2030 we will work with all other suppliers to reduce their environmental impact.

Zero Waste by 2030

Zero waste is defined as 90% of all UK waste reused and recycled by 2030. We have committed to an interim target of 75% reused and recycled by 2025, and eliminating single use plastic across operations, productions and supply chain by 2025.

Sustainable Culture by 2021

To embed a sustainable culture, we already announced earlier this year that all programmes produced by ITV will be Albert certified, and we are committing to all programmes commissioned to be certified by 2021. All ITV colleagues will also complete climate crisis training by the end of 2021.

Using our Reach

Alongside our ambitious targets, we are in a unique position,our programmes reach over 40 million viewers in the UK. This gives us the opportunity to promote and normalise behaviours on screen everyday.

That’s why we’ve been using the actions and storylines of our most-watched soaps, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, to promote sustainable behaviours.

Regularly attracting UK audiences of more than seven million viewers,on weekday evenings , six times a week, Coronation Street and Emmerdale episodes feature sustainable behaviours as part of the everyday actions of the characters. These include using reusable coffee cups and shopping bags, conversations around meat-free diets, taking public transport and buying locally-sourced food. From simply throwing a bottle into the recycling bin, to arguing over electricity use, our soaps have been a brilliant platform through which sustainable behaviours can be normalised.

Whether it’s normalising sustainable behaviour in our continuing dramas or stimulating conversation through our daytime, factual or current affairs programmes, raising awareness of environmental issues is increasingly topical. We are also exploring new commercial partnerships that promote sustainable lifestyles and encourage behavioural change amongst our viewers.

“No one can do everything, everyone can do something, together we can do anything”

Just as the quote highlights, together we can do anything and we want to use this Zero Waste Week to highlight some of the things we’re doing in ITV technology to play our part. From gamifying small behavioural changes in our teams, to electronic signatures across the business and partnerships with universities to model the carbon impact of our digital broadcast chain, we’ll be sharing stories through the week on some of our initiatives, big and small, that are helping us reduce our impact on the environment.

First up, join us tomorrow for a blog on how Emmerdale combined its sustainability aims with the new Covid filming rules after lockdown.

• Our Green team, established in 2019, is a cross-organisational steering group of senior managers at ITV with board-level sponsorship and a remit to work across the four identified areas of environmental change. It meets monthly to share ideas and help make change happen.