Environment

We make every effort to limit the environmental impact of our business and we have a range of initiatives in place to achieve this, such as providing extensive recycling facilities, implementing paperlight working procedures, and encouraging the use of walking, cycling, and public transport for both commuting and business trips.

Suppliers

We use a bicycle courier for all local deliveries which account for around 90% of our total. In addition, our contract taxi firm was the first CarbonNeutral-certified company in Scotland, which means that our taxi journeys leave no net carbon footprint. Wherever practicable, we try and operate regular scheduled deliveries to the office (e.g. for stationery supplies, off-site archiving uplifts/retrievals) to minimise our indirect carbon footprint caused by those visits.

Travel 

We use video-conferencing where intra-office meetings are required, avoiding the need to travel. Almost all travel between our Edinburgh and Glasgow offices is by train. We avoid taking taxis for short journeys whenever practicable. At our offices, we offer lockers and shower facilities in our offices to facilitate eco-friendly commuting by staff. A significant proportion do travel to work by bicycle or by walking. We participate in the government-sponsored "Cycle to Work" scheme and we offer our staff interest-free loans for the purchase of season tickets for public transport.

Agile working 

Agile working is a way of working in which we empower our people to work where, when and how they choose – with maximum flexibility and minimum constraints – to drive and optimise people performance and deliver “best in class” value for clients and customer service. From an environmental perspective, agile working also reduces travel needs, consume less energy and creates less office-related waste.

Our offices 

Our Edinburgh office at Quartermile is located in an extremely energy efficient building. The building has a rating of “Very Good” on the BREEAM scale. This is the second-highest rating on the UK’s most popular measure for assessing a building’s “greenness”.

The rectangular floor plate of our office has facilitated very efficient space-planning, enabling us to utilise all areas and operate in a smaller space than we did previously. We have open-plan work areas for all staff which optimises efficiency and reduces our “per capita” footprint.

We also have energy efficient lightbulbs, lighting controlled by motion sensors, central temperature control through a highly efficient VRV air-conditioning system, a virtualised server environment that reduces the number of servers we need and the energy required to run the servers and cool our hardware. We use multi-functional devices for printing, photocopying and scanning and a hot water cistern to which means we don't have kettles being repeatedly boiled.

Waste management 

We are committed to recycling as much of our waste as possible. We have taken away personal under-desk bins which ensures that all waste is separated responsibly at centralised recycling points.

We separate our waste on site into the following recycling streams: dry mixed recycling, confidential paper, and glass. We also separately recycle or responsibly dispose of batteries, toner cartridges and all IT equipment.

In Glasgow, our non-recyclable waste is further sorted into different streams at the contractor’s recycling plant, before it is incinerated to generate energy. Nothing is sent to landfill.

Paper consumption 

We have a comprehensive Paperlight Protocol in place and are committed to working electronically as much as possible. We have the following measures in place to ensure we can reduce our paper consumption; an electronic case management system, default double sided printing, FollowMe printing software so that pages are only printed after an individual keys in their PIN and confirms the items to print, 100% recycled paper that is PEFC-accredited for all our business correspondence and FSC-accrediated stationary.