We are actively committed to reducing our carbon emissions
We are actively committed to reducing our carbon emissions
We are already a low-carbon intensity business, but we recognise that seeking further reductions in our carbon emissions is important to our stakeholders and helps us to be a more efficient business. We are therefore committed to managing our impacts, particularly our two main impacts: energy use in our offices and business travel.
Energy Management
In 2006, we established an energy reduction programme to address our largest impact. This has achieved savings of 39% or 6,750 tonnes of CO2eq since it began. We continue to roll this programme out across our sites. We are subject to the UK Government's Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Regulations (CRC), which will charge a levy on our energy use carbon emissions. Where our sites are subject to these regulations we are required to monitor and report their energy consumption. We use smart meters to help sites to manage and meet their CRC obligations and establish good energy management practices.
Business travel management
Business travel is our second biggest impact. In 2010, we continued our efforts to reduce business travel across the Group, promoting the use of video and teleconferencing. In 2010, we made 179,000 conference calls (2009:116,000), an increase of 54%. We also invested in new Telepresence high definition video conference suites at a number of our offices in the UK and India, providing a platform for people to work collaboratively from remote sites reducing the necessity to travel. We will be installing more suites in 2011 with the aim of increasing site-to-site videoconferencing meetings. We hope to be able to extend the use of these to clients and key suppliers in the near future.
We encourage our employees to use alternatives to car travel by promoting the use of public transport and providing season ticket loans, using shuttle buses at our larger sites and by encouraging participation in our cycle to work scheme. All our company cars run on diesel and are now subject to a maximum emissions level of 160g CO2/km. We continue to add more 'green cars' to our fleet, and are currently trialling the use of hybrids and electric cars with London based employees.