Industry best
The scale of Royal Mail’s operations means we have a significant environmental impact. Managing this impact is a strategic imperative for our business.
By increasing our efficiency and reducing our use of resources, we can help to control our costs and support business performance. At the same time, we are striving to do everything we can to conserve the natural environment in which we operate.
Environmental considerations are a fundamental part of how we do business. We aim to embed these considerations in the way that our people behave, the technology we invest in, and our contracts with our suppliers.
We use a risk management process to identify and address environmental issues that result from our business.
Last year, we refreshed our environment strategy to help drive continuous improvement in our performance. The five-year strategy focuses on the following key objectives:
- Embedding internal and external environment standards across our operation, such as our Safety, Health and Environment management system standards for energy, carbon, waste and water management, and ISO14001 - a family of standards related to environmental management that exists to help organizations minimize how their operations negatively affect the environment
- Actively anticipating and responding to emerging environmental issues by working closely with relevant stakeholders and implementing effective governance controls
- Adopting existing and new technologies that will help us to reduce our emissions and resource use
- Building environmental awareness and encouraging behavioural change in our workforce to drive performance against our carbon, waste and water targets; and
- Promoting the benefits of strong environmental management with customers and through our supply chain.
We will monitor our performance against our strategy using three existing targets: reducing our total carbon emissions, reducing our water consumption, and increasing waste diverted from landfill.
For more information about our environmental strategy, key initiatives, targets and performance, see pages 72-81 of the 2017-18 Corporate Responsibility Report.
