Eunomia worked with ScottishPower, one of the UK’s largest energy providers, to support the delivery of a vital commitment in its Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Plan: developing a Circular Economy Baseline and Action Plan to help tackle emissions from the company’s Scope 3 carbon footprint. 

ScottishPower supplies gas and electricity to over five million households and businesses in the UK. As a vertically integrated energy company, it not only generates power but operates distribution and transmission networks and sells gas and electricity. In 2019, it became the first integrated energy company in the UK to generate 100% green electricity from its UK windfarms, provided to customers on its domestic green tariffs.

In 2023, ScottishPower committed to developing a detailed circular economy action plan by 2025 – one of several targets and actions for circularity set out in its Action 2030 strategy.

ScottishPower recognises that the resources needed to enable societal decarbonisation through building and operating renewable energy infrastructure are finite and have their own climate impacts. It is committed to reducing carbon emissions from the construction, operation, and maintenance of green electricity infrastructure by embedding circularity principles across its business processes.

Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) commissioned Eunomia to support the company’s efforts to achieve this goal.

We examined resource use across the company’s energy networks and renewable production to identify potential ways of increasing circularity. We then gathered views from key industry stakeholders through interviews and targeted workshops. Based on this research, we created a long list of opportunities to enhance existing circularity and interventions that would remove barriers to increased circularity. The outputs of Eunomia’s work form the basis of ScottishPower’s Circular Economy Action Plan, which will be developed in 2024-25 by its newly formed Circular Economy Working Group. This time-bound Action Plan for delivery will drive the further evolution of the company’s strategy, governance, targets, metrics, data, and reporting.