News

Our environmental footprint.

Environmental sustainability is a key factor in the buildings we design – but this is not the only way we can minimise our footprint for future generations.

We measure energy use and calculate the carbon emissions associated with our places of work and business travel with the overall objective of improving our environmental impact.

Further to this, we have environmental management representatives across the business who monitor and report on our resource consumption, employing robust management systems registered to ISO standards.

Office energy use.

Although not always possible, where we can, we measure and monitor the energy used in our offices and calculate the resulting CO₂ emissions. This enables us to analyse, understand, and reduce our environmental impact in the future.

Our latest data set shows readings taken from two of our larger offices, Bristol and Bournemouth. Both offices show a steady reduction in the use of electricity, gas, and subsequent CO₂ emissions, as more sustainable practices are employed, both technically and culturally.

In fact, environmental monitoring has revealed that our annual energy use and emissions have been declining every year since monitoring began in 2009.

Business travel.

In 2016, our CO₂ emissions from business travel across the firm were 273.7kg per full-time equivalent (FTE) member of staff – this equates to a total emission of 243.1 tonnes of CO₂.

Whilst slightly up on 2015 due to an increase in business mileage, the overall trend in business travel-related emissions continues to reduce, and remain more than 70% lower than they were in 2009.

We continue to monitor the effectiveness of our car policy in promoting lower emission cars, and look to continue the downward trend in 2017.

For more information on office monitoring and reducing your impact, please contact our Sustainability team.