Sales manager, environmental obsessive and reserve Gendarme - the many sides of Pierre Richard!

Pierre Richard is a Sales Manager in Cedo’s Paris office and he is responsible for dealing with key clients like the supermarket giant Carrefour. A self-confessed environmental obsessive, Pierre keeps chickens and grows his own vegetables while still finding time to work weekends as a reserve Gendarme.?

I was raised to never waste anything. I grew up in the semi-rural southeast of France close to Grasse and my parents taught me the importance of getting the best use out of everything from food to clothes. They would recycle bottles and paper whenever possible and I can still remember my grandfather trying his best to repair broken household appliances – nothing got thrown away.

I have worked for Cedo for nine years now, and the company’s environmental stance has always been a very big factor for me. In sales it is important to believe in the products you are dealing with and from the beginning I was impressed with how forward-thinking the company is in terms of using recycled materials and reducing our environmental impact.

These days everyone understands that recycling is important, but they don’t perhaps realise that there is always more you can do to help. Little things like removing paper labels from plastic packaging and putting them into separate recycling bins. This makes such a big difference as it greatly reduces the energy required for recycling and cuts the amount of material being rejected and sent to landfill.

I suppose you could say that I am a little bit obsessed with reducing my environmental impact. We have a very conscientious workforce but even among my Cedo colleagues I am probably considered a little crazy with how seriously I take my carbon footprint. And it doesn’t stop with meticulous recycling.

At home I keep chickens, which provides my family with all the eggs we need, and they taste better than anything you can get in the shops. We also have a vegetable patch that gives us lots of healthy organic greens. We weigh all the food we cook, meaning there is very little left at the end of a meal, and what waste there is all goes to good use, so we feed it to the chickens, or make it into compost that can then go to nourish the vegetables.

With a full-time job you can imagine that I am pretty busy. But ever since I did my military service after school I have wanted to do something extra to help out. So five years ago I signed up to become a reservist with the Gendarmerie. At weekends I am often out on patrol in the city, and then we get called in for big events, which is bound to mean working during the Olympics when it comes to Paris in 2024. I love volunteering as a Gendarme because I meet people from all different walks of life and get to know the real France.

I might not have that much spare time, but I am happy this way. I get great satisfaction for working for a company like Cedo that shares the same philosophy as me. This means that coming to work doesn’t feel like a chore, because I really believe in what I am doing. I hope that some of my enthusiasm rubs off on the people around me.