Meet the Green Businesses

Tell us about your business and its core values

Green Shoots is an emission-free courier service based in Market Harborough. Using our fully electric mid-sized van, we offer an efficient, friendly, and competitively priced alternative for businesses (and individuals) to regular fossil-fuelled delivery companies.
Our core values are delivering excellent customer service – as well as anything from parcels to pallets – in a sustainable way that benefits our customers, their customers and the environment.

Why Harborough for your business?

Having lived in Harborough for over 30 years, raising our family, being involved with various local clubs and having run a business at the Innovation Centre, we’ve got to know a lot of people – so it seemed to be the natural choice.
It is also the ideal base for a business focused on sustainability, with so many local companies wanting to reduce the impact they are having on the environment and keen to find a simple solution.

Why is an emission free, eco-friendly delivery service important to you?

We consider ourselves to be typical of most people living in and around Harborough – we try to ‘do our bit’ for the environment in terms of using the excellent local recycling facilities, supporting local businesses and buying organic as often as we can – but recognise we can do more.

When Covid-19 hit last year and we saw the huge increase in delivery vehicles on the roads, we recognised there was an opportunity to reduce the amount of pollution these additional fumes produced by offering an emission-free alternative.

We are really proud that after just 9 months, thanks to our customers choosing Green Shoots over ‘regular’ delivery services, we have saved over 4 tonnes of carbon emissions. That’s the equivalent of four return flights between London and New York, or planting 24 new trees!

What advice would you have for other businesses that want to begin with greener operations for their business?

Becoming greener doesn’t have to be costly or time-consuming – small changes can make a big difference.

Now staff are going back to the office, consider the work environment: for example, are recycling bins readily available in the kitchen; are staff aware of, and encouraged to take advantage of, the ‘cycle to work’ scheme; can more be done to promote paperless systems etc.?

And, of course, if businesses use a delivery service to send or receive goods, they could significantly reduce their carbon footprint by simply switching to an emission-free courier company instead! A 100-mile journey using our electric van saves around 20kgs of carbon emissions – that’s the same amount as an average tree absorbs in a year!

Find out more about the great work that Green Shoots do and how your business can work with them via the link below.