Our planet
Becoming a zero
waste business
Eliminating all avoidable waste from
our operations, by 2030.
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We’re committed to reducing the environmental impact of our offices by avoiding, and where possible, eliminating the volume of materials wasted and conserving our resources. We’ve made good progress in reducing the amount of waste we produce, including waste associated with our catering facilities and our paper consumption.
Waste
In 2019, we introduced our single-use plastic commitment, focused on reducing our consumption of single-use plastics across our estate. We’ve taken great steps, not just in achieving our plastic commitment, but in working with our suppliers and colleagues to help us reduce, re-use and recycle. And it’s not just single-use plastic we’re tackling – there are lots of steps we’re taking that have reduced the amount of waste we produce by:
- Removing disposable cups from our water dispensing machines (and issuing a reusable bottle to all colleagues), eliminating approximately 6 million disposable cups and tonnes of waste.
- We’ve worked behind the scenes with our suppliers to identify ways of eliminating waste packaging from coming into our offices. We worked with the supplier of our new laptops for example to minimise the packaging and ensure we could reuse it for the return of the old laptops.
- In addition to removing the thousands of single use items from our waste stream; plastic straws, stirrers and sauce sachets, we have also switched to compostable products for any remaining disposables. All of our coffee cups, lids, soup bowls, hot meal and salad packaging are made from vegetable-based materials which are 100% compostable. Where possible, we’re removing disposables all together, like in our Watford office.
- Reusing and recycling our waste, including reusing our office furniture to support our hybrid working colleagues, donating our used IT equipment to schools and charities and recycling as much of our waste as possible including food waste, crisp packets and coffee cups.
Paper
Since 2017, we have reduced our paper use by over 90%. Our people have played a huge part in helping us to achieve this, and we continue to engage them on good paper reduction habits. We’ve also reduced the number of printers across our offices and maintained default settings on colleague computers to print double-sided, to further reduce paper use.
We’ve also switched to other paperless solutions across our office operations – our expenses system is paperless, where possible, our outgoing and incoming mail is paperless and we’re supporting our colleagues to use technology to reduce the need to print.
We’ve also removed paper hand towels from the restrooms in our largest offices where there are hand-dryer alternatives which has saved more than a 1,000 trees per month.
Food waste
Reducing the amount of food we waste across our offices has always been a priority, with our chefs coming up with innovative recipes to use edible food that may have otherwise been thrown away. They use carrot peelings to make carrot cake and coffee grounds to make brownies which are then sold in our staff restaurant.
A huge amount of perfectly edible food is wasted every year – 6.4 million tonnes in 2018 according to a study by the sustainability charity WRAP.1 We’ve teamed up with Waste Knot, an organisation who give farms a route to market for their ‘wonky’ fruit and vegetables. Our catering outlets in our Canada Square office in Canary Wharf have used wonky vegetables that would have otherwise been wasted.
Since August 2021, we’ve been working with Olio, a charity that helps redistribute meals. In that time, over 7,000 meals have been supplied to local families. It has proven so successful that we are actively working with our caterer and Olio to identify other opportunities across our various office locations.
We’re converting our waste cooking oil into biodiesel. We’ve also removed all unsustainable palm oil and stopped using any air freighted products in our catering outlets.
What next?
We’re making good progress, but we continue to look out for new initiatives and ideas to help us to eliminate all avoidable waste from our operations. This includes working with our contractors and suppliers to remove any waste associated with deliveries and exploring how we can adopt successful initiatives across more of our offices.