Coca-Cola sustainability consultancy expands in the Middle East
TEP works across the Middle East and India, on environmental and social impact assessments, waste and hazardous materials management, environmental and health and safety auditing and will change its name to Anthesis TEP.
Moved into Abu Dhabi last year
Cat Hobbs, communications manager, Anthesis, told FoodProductionDaily the acquisition, its seventh in 18 months and second one overseas, strengthens its presence in the Middle East after entering Abu Dhabi last year.
TEP works across property development, energy, public and corporate clients including Daewoo, Sheraton, HSBC, Aurecon and Aedas.
“There is a great deal of growth and development, and a number of global events, happening in the Middle East and an increasing focus on energy and sustainability in the region,” she said.
For example, Estidama, (Arabic for ‘sustainability’) is part of Abu Dhabi's Plan 2030, created by the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC) to improve the quality of life for residents of the Emirate in four areas; sustainability: environmental, economic, social, and cultural.
“It’s an exciting market for us to be entering into. Going into this region underlines our ambition to become a global sustainability specialist firm,” added Hobbs.
London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games
Anthesis worked with Katherine Symonds, sustainability consultant, when she worked for The Coca-Cola Company, during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
As the official sponsor of the Olympic Torch Relay it contacted Anthesis to make sure the 70-day event had minimum impact on the environment.
It measured the carbon emissions from every aspect of Coca-Cola’s involvement in the games from staff uniforms, fridges, transport, energy use and merchandise and converted two vehicles to run on diesel-electric hybrid power.
Its main vehicle, the Beatbox, was also fitted with an exhaust cleanup system and a low emission auxiliary generator. Uniforms were made from fabric using recycled plastic bottles.
The current owner and MD of TEP, Enda Colfer, will join Anthesis global management team and confirmed it agreed to join Anthesis to become part of a larger international firm to meet the growth in demand for its services.
Tesco retail supply chain
“Prospects in the Middle East are increasingly exciting for environmental and sustainability consulting,” he said.
Colfer added the company had already partnered with Anthesis on a number of projects including its DrySatMap technology, using remote sensors to determine geological conditions, flood risk, solar yield, sea level rise, saline intrusion and water scarcity trends in arid or semi-arid areas.
Anthesis also worked with Tesco on its Farm to Fork metric to reduce food waste through its global supply chains.
It found although the UN FAO had published information relating to food losses during production, high level information had not yet been applied to a retail supply chain.
Working with UK WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) it calculated a food waste “footprint” and identified waste “hotspots” through the value chain for Tesco’s most frequently purchased products, developing tailored action plans for each product.
This included ending multi-buy offers on large bags of salads and building more accurate IT systems for ordering and planning bakery products. With its grapes, it found 17% of production was wasted by the consumer so Tesco focused on developing strategies to get fresher produce from their suppliers and making improvements in storage advice on packaging.
