Eversheds
Eversheds has 10 offices in the UK. The firm fully occupies some buildings, but is a tenant in others. This presented the firm with challenges in measuring its carbon footprint.
We recognise that everyone has a part to play in reducing climate change, and in line with our CR activities, the firm is committed to reducing energy usage. Not only does being green make good business sense, it is also seen by our employees as an environmentally responsible working practice.
In order to realise reductions it is vital to measure our output, and this was the first step that we took in obtaining our carbon footprint.
As several of our offices are part-occupied within multi-tenanted buildings, it was often difficult, if not impossible, to obtain accurate energy consumption figures. In some buildings, bills are apportioned amongst all tenants, by floor area. In such cases our consumption figures were estimates.
We defined our carbon footprint as emissions emanating from:
- energy use
- employee business travel
- employee commuting
- deliveries
- waste disposal
- refrigerants.
We appointed the Carbon Neutral Company to help determine our carbon footprint, and each Facilities Manager was sent a questionnaire to aid data collection. To obtain our commuting data we sent a survey to staff, receiving a 55% response rate. Travel data was obtained for rail, road and air, and missing data was estimated using averages calculated from similar-sized offices.
The Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM) analysed the data to determine our Carbon Footprint.
Regular measuring and recording of energy consumption is extremely useful when you need to gather data for this process. We learnt that to ease the process in the future we need to ensure that our data is regularly updated.
ECCM identified that the area where we can make the most energy savings is the energy used by our premises. Our premises energy usage accounted for between 46% and 91% of emissions.
We were pleased to confirm that our policy of travelling between offices by public transport meant that business travel did not represent the main part of our footprint.
We have measured our carbon footprint and notified the business. We have presented the figures per office, per employee, as a national average, and as a total figure.
We know that this is only the start of our journey and the road ahead is a long one. We are one of the largest full service law firms in the world, with 38 offices in major cities across the UK, Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. This year we focused on the UK to ensure our measurement procedures are robust.
We are working on ways to better identify and prioritise measures to reduce our footprint. Once we have decided on these measures we shall undertake internal training, raise awareness, and work towards achieving a high level of staff engagement.
it is vital that we include all areas of the business in our energy management process and provide feedback on progress made.