Aura Sustainability win environmental award for efficiency

Press Release - For Immediate Release – 9th May 2011

Aura Sustainability win environmental award for efficiency

Aura Sustainability is celebrating winning the 2011 Marlborough Environmental Award for Efficiency. The award, which was presented for Aura’s barefootTM solutions, was accepted by Aura directors and employees at a Gala dinner held at the Drylands Winery on Friday evening.

Aura are a consultancy who work with a number of companies in the area of sustainability, including Marlborough based wineries Highfield Estate, Yealands Estate and Grove Mill. Over the last 3 years Aura have set about building capability in the emerging area of product carbon footprinting and are now the foremost providers of life cycle solutions to the wine industry globally through barefootTM.

In winning the award for barefootTM the directors explained that it was important for Aura to provide producers with cutting edge information on carbon in the supply chain and that this information was integral in keeping them efficient and competitive in the global marketplace. Aura Chairman, David Pearce, commenting on the accolade said:

“Although we are based in Marlborough, our customers and partners are global. Earlier this year we signed a partnership agreement with the Australian Wine Research Institute to provide life cycle carbon solutions to Australian wineries and we are now working closely with the Carbon Trust in the UK to streamline our tools and models into software packages. We are very proud to be recognised locally for the work we are doing and we hope, that given the right support, our company can continue to be a success story for Marlborough and New Zealand.”

Pearce and fellow Aura founder, Roger Kerrison, were responsible for the world’s first carbon neutral wines at Grove Mill in 2006. More recently Aura used their barefootTM tools and models in the Carbon Reduction Label certification of Mobius Sauvingon Blanc, another wine made at Grove Mill.

BarefootTM has also been used to provide carbon assessments for the wines Highfield Estate make for Tesco PLC and the carboNZero wines of sustainability pioneer Yealands Estate - including the first 750ml wine in New Zealand to be packaged in PET - Full Circle Sauvignon Blanc.

Kerrison, who manages the technical aspects for Aura says that the goal of barefootTM is to continually reduce the cost for producers who want to start measuring the carbon footprint of their products.

“We want barefootTM to be affordable, this is why we are investing strongly in the software side of the business to minimize the need for expert consultancy and the cost of certification. At the moment we can deliver carbon measurement cheaper than it would cost companies to train and employ specialists internally, but over time we hope that our software will be so intuitive that the process can be managed internally by those with basic accounting skills, therefore reducing the cost further.”
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