LEX Autolease has supported the Co-op with its drive to significantly reduce its company vehicle emissions by replacing petrol and diesel cars with Electric Vehicles, reducing the average vehicle CO2 per km by 47%.
Co-op is the UK’s fifth biggest food retailer with more than 2,500 local, convenience and medium-sized stores. It also offers funeral, insurance, and legal services.
Co-op’s wider sustainability commitments to safeguard the environment and tackle the climate emergency, has seen the company half its emissions since 2006, and has pledged further commitments to reduce emissions from running its business by a further 50% by 2025 through science-based targets.
With these aggressive targets as a backdrop the Co-op implemented a new fleet policy centred on Ultra Low Emission Vehicles (ULEVs) to help contribute to the wider business goals.
Since launching the new sustainable policy in March 2020, Co-op has incentivised its choice list to encourage drivers to opt for greener vehicles, ordering 275 ULEVs to replace the current traditionally fuelled vehicles on its fleet. 62% of these new vehicles were delivered during 2020, alongside 35 pure EVs.
Spurred on by the initial success of this transition to battery-power, in December 2020, Co-op announced it would replace its fleet of fossil-fuel delivery vans with pure EVs by 2025.
For the funeral arm of the business, 2020 saw the delivery of its first regenerative hybrid hearses, with further electrification investment planned for the future.
Lex Autolease is working closely with Co-op on its continual reduction of CO2, while also benchmarking against the broader sector to ensure the business maintains its sustainability leadership credentials.
Mark Darby, Customer Relationship Manager at Lex Autolease, said: “Our longstanding relationship with Co-op has allowed us to get to know the team and business extremely well, enabling us to recommend and develop a tailored solution. Over the past few months in particular, we’ve had our foot on the accelerator as Co-op looked to drive down its overall fleet emissions.
“Co-op is well-known for its ethical credentials and has publicly committed to slashing its emissions. It’s great that we’ve been able to assist in helping the business on the next step of its sustainability journey.
“To help with tracking its progress, we’ve been providing Co-op with regular updates using our Sustainability Dashboard, which offers our customers tailored insights into key metrics, along with the historic and a future fleet sustainability trajectory.”
Co-op is headquartered in Manchester and has worked with Lex Autolease for more than 13 years. It has a fleet of more than 2,900 vehicles, which is made up of 1,300 company cars and 1,600 specialist vehicles.
