Our B Corp Announcement

Thu, Feb 24, 2022

We did it! It’s official, Portt & Co is now a B Corp. We’ve join over 4,000 organisations around the world in shaking things up and using business as a force for good.

What is a B Corp?

B Corp is the only certification that measures a company’s entire social and environmental impact.

To achieve certification, companies must demonstrate high social and environmental performance by scoring 80 or above in the B Impact Assessment, make a legal commitment to be accountable to all stakeholders and exhibit transparency by allowing their performance to be publicly available on the B Lab website. You can view ours here.

The overall goal is a global economy that uses business as a force for good.

Our B Corp journey

A passion to create a better future runs through all of us at Portt & Co. When our Founder, Matt Portt shared his vision to become a B Corp with the team it was unanimous.

We wasted no time and started working with a consultant, assigning areas of responsibility to suit our strengths, covering the five areas of impact: governance, community, environment, customers and workers.

For us, it was a way of officially cementing our views and values by implementing new policies and procedures, making changes to the way we work and being as transparent as possible, ensuring that profit, people and the planet are balanced in all that we do.

We had already made the decision to offset our carbon emissions through Ecologi prior to starting the Impact Assessment, which had already opened our eyes to new ways of reducing our carbon footprint and looking after the planet.

Key areas of focus

The B Corp certification isn’t just about us, it’s about the community of businesses around the world. We are excited to engage with them, learn from them and inspire others to consider their own impact on people and the planet.

Our key areas of focus are:

• Minimising our CO2 emissions.
• Eliminating waste.
• Improving the working conditions of our team.
• Creating high quality jobs, supported with internationally recognised qualifications in Romania.

Our ‘why’

Through my work with Unseen UK, I’ve awoken to the fact that slavery and exploitation exists in the supply chains across the world, not just overseas but here in the UK too. In the last quarter alone, 897 potential victims of modern slavery were identified by the Modern Slavery and Exploitation Helpline, with Romanian nationals the most likely to be targeted.

In 2021, my second child was born, and I decided that I didn’t want my children to live in a world that exploits people and destroys our planet for the sake of profit. When sharing with our team, there was a strong group sentiment for a different vision. We’ve therefore decided to join the B Corp movement to hold ourselves accountable for having a positive impact on all our stakeholders and the planet, whilst still making a profit. – Matt Portt, Founder and CEO