Exclusive: William Hill becomes one of the first operators to go carbon neutral

William Hill has become another business in the igaming sector to go carbon neutral, which forms a key part of its environmental, social and governance (ESG) policy.

Speaking exclusively to EGR, Hills chief procurement officer David Medori cited the prior absence of an ESG policy prior to taking the role of CPO four and a half years ago, and the shift towards a more sustainable business model occurring over his tenure.

“Back then, under our previous environmental policy, I would report into what was then called the Corporate Responsibility Committee, our non-executive directors, the PLC board and effectively demonstrated progress on a quarterly basis. It then started to receive that high level of attention at board level, and effectively I was pushed to further improve our approach. So that started the journey and our ambition towards carbon neutrality,” Medori explained.

In his role as CPO, Medori is also responsible also procurement and hedging of electricity for all Hills retail premises, a demand which he highlighted as becoming an “even bigger” bill over the years, magnified recently by the cost-of-living crisis currently hitting the UK, a crisis which made the switch to carbon neutrality a natural one.

“We’ve got offices dotted all around the world, but they are all effectively single offices, 90% of our consumption of electricity comes from our shops in the UK, we’ve got air conditioning, we’ve got SSBT machines, we’ve got FOBT machines and other devices and equipment that all consume energy,” he explained.

Medori went on to explain how the operator went about becoming carbon neutral. “First of all, establishing a sustainability committee. We had to bring all the right stakeholders into a group to look at actions and measures that could be implemented. From that point, we would write a business case and present it to the division heads to get sign-off, but we had to make sure the business case made sense for energy efficiency measures.

“We started off with simple measures like low energy LED lighting, which was a big exercise across the whole estate of shops. We then put in smart meters because if we couldn’t measure our consumption, we wouldn’t know how much we are using. By using these meters, we can see what we are using on a shop-by-shop level, and we can benchmark what we need to do in each shop and what controls we need to put in place,” he added.

Due to these measures, the 888-owned operator was able to reduce its tonnage of carbon. When this process started, William Hill was producing 32,000 tonnes of CO2, which dropped to 24,000 tonnes. The operator last recorded carbon tonnage was 13,000 tonnes which meant it could declare itself carbon neutral after purchasing fully renewable electricity. Medori went on to explain what he found the biggest challenge behind implementing this strategy.

He commented: “The biggest challenge is always getting the investment approved. It was no challenge in terms of the appetite to do the right thing, but spending money on expensive initiatives with the aim of saving money further on always generates some competing priorities, whereas putting money into the business to generate more revenue will always be less of a challenge.”

William Hill was recently taken over by 888, and Medori did clarify what impact this may have to this ongoing strategy.

“I would say we will do things on a group-wide basis and it will be done collectively,” he added.