Sustainability: Making changes & thinking differently

Sustainability

We are in the process of completely redeveloping our approach to facilities management and bringing in new resources to look after the environmental areas of our Forward Community Programme and drive this area forward. We currently operate a paperless office and have done so for over a decade. We recycle of course, including our end of life electronics and have recently switched to cloud computing. Sustainability has been on our radar for some time, and we were starting to focus on this as Coronavirus hit. As we start to return to our offices (that are now all COVID secure), our plans are to look at how we can improve our environmental credentials with a focus on:

• Our front of house and facilities management strategy to ensure our offices are managed in a sustainable way. This covers everything from where we buy our materials to the suppliers we use and the mechanisms we have in place to reduce energy and waste. We will be working with facilities management experts to help us achieve this.
  
• A new travel policy looking to consolidate purchasing, review travel options and offer more green alternatives where possible and encourage the use of technology to facilitate meetings rather than transport. We have had comprehensive video conferencing facilities in our meeting rooms for a long time. We now have this facility at everyone’s desks, as well as a newly created VC studio in each office with enhanced lighting and sound to enable us to conduct virtual meetings in a very professional way. Coronavirus has proven we can do things differently and we plan to take positives from this experience and continue to employ technology to reduce travel where possible.
  
  

Current Initiatives

We know we have more to do, but we have been considering sustainability for some time. We took environmental credentials into consideration in the selection of our two newest offices in Bristol and Cambridge. Our Bristol team are based in the Aurora Building, the first building outside London to achieve BREEAM Outstanding under the 2014 New Construction Offices Scheme, and one of only six in the UK. Aurora beats its targets for energy efficiency in every area and is truly a low impact building. It uses 55% less carbon and has 51% better energy consumption than current Building Regulations stipulate, as well as using 51% less water than required by the latest regulations. Other green features include: rooftop mounted solar panels, intelligent LED lighting, a heat recovery system which will reuse waste heat, energy regeneration technology, electric car charging points and secure bicycle and motorcycle storage. Our Cambridge Office in the Maurice Wilks Building has also targeted BREEAM ‘very good’ accreditation.

We try to be sustainable in our overall approach to our business full stop and make sure the little things are considered, such as glass milk bottles rather than plastic and the ability to recycle any materials we produce. We have also recently reviewed the sustainability of our meeting rooms and as well as recycling our coffee capsules, our tea bags are biodegradable and our biscuits are organic and baked using renewable energy.

We try not to print unless we have to and when we do we consider the paper we use, it's sustainability and whether it can be recycled. For example our business cards are printed on a new kind of paper made from 100% recycled T-shirts offcuts - the stuff that normally gets thrown away!  Our magazine is printed on PEFC accredited paper, this means it is has been sourced from sustainably managed forests, which adhere to environmentally approved standards. This paper has less carbon footprint than recycled paper. The magazine can also be recycled and the polywrap it is sent out in is made from bio compostable material.