Carbon Footprint
OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT
The Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management carries out our carbon footprint assessment following the Greenhouse Gas Protocol methodology. For the Financial Year 2009/10, our footprint for UK was 239,679 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e). Most of our emissions (92%) arise from electricity use at our premises - in particular electricity required to run our air conditioning and cooling plant at technical sites.
Business travel generates 4% of our footprint and employees commuting a further 1.5%. We run colleague awareness campaigns to focus on reducing carbon emissions in these areas.
We have signed up to the Prince of Wales May Day Network, the UK’s largest group of businesses committed to taking action against climate change and have recently joined other leading businesses in signing the Cancun Communique which urges further carbon targets to be set to reduce global emissions from 2012. We report publicly on our carbon footprint through the Carbon Disclosure Project.
Cable&Wireless Worldwide is in scope for the UK Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme designed to raise awareness of energy management. The scheme requires us to purchase carbon allowances to cover our energy consumption. We have established accurate monitoring processes and already have many initiatives underway to help drive energy efficiency improvements.
We have committed to reduce our total UK carbon emissions by 6% per annum in 2011/12 and 2012/13 and to further reduce our total UK carbon emissions by 4% per annum every year from 2013/14 to 2019/2020.
GREEN TRAVEL
We actively promote more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways to travel to and from work and while on company business. For example, we run a car-sharing scheme through Liftshare in the UK, provide loans for public transport season tickets and shuttle buses to our HQ from mainline railway stations. We run frequent campaigns to encourage colleagues to get involved in events such as our annual Bike Week where Cable&Wireless Worldwide sponsors staff to cycle to work, donating the proceeds to charity. We have also launched a popular Smart Cycles scheme which offers attractive discounts and repayment options on a range of bikes and accessories. Our salary sacrifice green car scheme enables our colleagues to choose from a selection of cars that are low in CO2 emissions.
Recent successes in business travel reduction have included the introduction of a new Workforce Management System which identifies the field engineer with the right skills closest to the job - saving up to 10% in emissions through reduced travel. A huge drive to ensure routers are dispatched fully configured saves our field engineers time and effort in configuration or sourcing documentation, saving us around 600 round trips per month. By optimising present opportunities, including the use of video conferencing, and through introducing new opportunities we hope to reduce carbon emissions from business travel by 10% by April 2012.
