Controlling our environmental impacts
Aim: as a service business our direct environmental impacts are not broad, but due to the scale of our business our impacts need to be managed well.
We have identified our main Group-wide environmental impacts as:
- energy use and business travel
- resource use and waste management
- our supply chain.
Progress: We have an environmental management system in place based on the ISO14001 standard which allows us to monitor and manage our impacts and continually improve our performance in these areas. Our environmental policy sets out our commitment to complying with relevant environmental legislation and outlines Board level responsibilities.
Energy use and business travel
We are committed to playing our part in tackling carbon emissions. We have published our carbon footprint annually since 2005. In 2009, our total footprint was 79,212 tonnes, an increase of 8.4% over 2008 (73,057 tonnes), while our Group revenues increased by 10%. In particular, emissions from business travel and use of electricity have increased across our fast growing operations in India.
We commenced an energy reduction programme in 2006 and committed to use 12% less energy at our largest sites by the end of 2008, a target we exceeded. In 2009, we made a further 11.9% saving and a 28% saving in total since the programme began, a CO2 emissions reduction of 4,400 tonnes. We have continued to increase the energy efficiency of our operations, expanding our energy reduction plan across a further 80 sites.
Despite a greater focus on controlling business travel, our business travel emissions grew by 10% compared to the previous year, even though we increased the use of conference calls. In 2010, we will launch a targeted campaign to reduce our business travel emissions through further raising employee awareness.
Through the work we have completed we are positioned well to respond to the introduction of the new Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) regulations, operational from April 2010. We have achieved the Carbon Trust Standard for 2 of our divisions assuring us a good ranking in the league table in the first phase of the CRC. We are also installing automatic meter reading (AMR) over the next 2 years to track performance against the AMR metric of CRC.
Resources and waste management
As a largely office based business our focus is primarily to use resources efficiently and reduce our waste and, secondly, to focus on re-using and recycling materials. The reduction of our paper use is key to this so we focus on designing and implementing services which reduce the need to produce printed materials. Where waste must be disposed of we ensure that this is done safely, and in compliance with all legislation. We work with our suppliers to help us reduce our impacts through the introduction of environmentally responsible products. We also focus on the logistics of delivering goods, both to reduce costs and emissions.