Annual report 2017: Our corporate impact

Our target was to reduce our total carbon emissions by 25% by 2017 against our 2007 baseline. Achieving a 5% drop this year brings our total emissions reduction to -29%, significantly exceeding our goal.

We’ve primarily delivered this through sustained investment in reducing the energy we consume in our offices, switching to a 100% renewable electricity provider, and addressing non-essential business travel.

Additionally, we’ve offset our emissions, as reported in each year since 2007, to achieve carbon neutrality.

Business travel is the largest source of our carbon emissions – as our work requires us to travel to our clients. However, we’ve reduced our travel emissions by 4% since 2007, exceeding our ambitious target to hold them flat over that period. This is in spite of significant growth in the business over that time, and more international work.

We’ve largely achieved this by focusing on avoidable travel, and promoting online meetings and other collaborative technologies as viable alternatives.

To support our target of holding emissions from business travel flat, we’ve run regular campaigns to raise awareness and encourage the uptake of online meeting technology as an alternative to non-essential travel.

This has helped us to reach 7.1 hosted meetings per person per year, which reflects the widespread adoption of collaborative technologies across the firm. We’re slightly short of our target of 10, however, as we’ve recently introduced a number of new technologies for which we’re currently unable to measure usage data.

The energy we use in our offices has been a significant contributor to our carbon footprint, so we set a target to reduce it by 50% between 2007 and 2017. Our energy consumption dropped again this year, helping us to hit our target.

In that time, we’ve invested extensively in renewing and consolidating our buildings across the country, and pioneering new technologies and ways of working. Two of our offices have been recognised as among the greenest in the UK.

This year our paper consumption has fallen again, to 64% below our 2007 baseline, remaining significantly ahead of our target of -50%.

As well as encouraging a greater use of digital documents and online collaboration, we’ve delivered this reduction through replacing desk-side printers with multifunctional devices. These default to double-sided printing, and also won’t print without a staff security pass being swiped, eliminating unintentional printing while also improving information security.

Although it's our least material environmental impact, we set a -50% target for our water consumption from our 2007 baseline. Our result, of -40% is shy of that, but nevertheless is a great improvement, given our headcount growth.

We’ve achieved this reduction by investing in new plant and technology in our offices. Although we’ve reached the limit of what is currently commercially viable, we’ll continue to monitor for opportunities to improve in the future.

We’ve reduced our day-to-day office waste by 61% since 2007, a great achievement given the increase in our headcount. But, a periodic surge in the recycling of our old archived files this year means that the total waste reduction is 46% – just shy of our 50% reduction target.

We’ve achieved these reductions by progressively adopting the principles of the ‘circular economy’ – reducing consumption, increasing the proportion of materials we divert to reuse or recycling, and exploring ‘circular’ solutions for the products and services that we purchase.

We achieved ‘zero waste to landfill’ in 2012 for all the waste generated on our main offices floors and from our on-site catering. We’ve maintained this status ever since. Any materials not recovered are sent to incineration which generates energy.

Details about how we did this, and our lessons learned, are available on our corporate sustainability website.

Having achieved zero waste to landfill in 2012, we set an aspirational target to recycle 100% of our waste by 2017, challenging ourselves to think differently about the materials we use.

We’ve made great progress since then, recycling 86% this year compared to 55% in 2007. We’ve largely achieved it through replacing desk-side bins with central recycling hubs, substituting unsustainable items with recyclable alternatives, and campaigns to encourage our people to segregate more of their waste. Much of the shortfall stems from non-recyclable items such as composite food packaging. We’re engaging stakeholders to identify potential solutions for this, but expect it to take time.