Carbon

Carbon emissions
Climate change is, without doubt, one of the biggest challenges the world faces today, and as a responsible business, we must play our part in addressing this. It takes a significant amount of energy to manage our operations, and construct buildings. But we are reducing the amount of energy we use year-on-year as we find new ways of becoming more energy efficient.

Total emissions (tCO₂e)

In 2015 we set a new, industry-leading target to halve carbon emissions intensity by 2020 (compared with 2010). We exceeded this target by the end of 2017, and between 2017 and 2018 we reduced our emissions intensity by a further 3%, meaning that since 2010 we have reduced emissions by 59%.

Reductions are mainly due to improvements made by our site teams. By ensuring early grid connections, and by continually improving the way that site cabins are set up, they are reducing reliance on carbon-intensive diesel. In 2018 we worked with our energy providers to gain access to half-hourly data on all our sites, to identify and address problems more quickly. Other improvements include the launch of our power planning tool, which allows our project teams to more accurately predict the power supply they will need. Being able to predict the amount of power required encourages our people to choose more environmentally-friendly generators, e.g. hybrid.

Travel is another key area for us. Initiatives, like our bonus scheme for people choosing low emission company or private cars, are helping to reduce our carbon footprint. In 2018 we paid out nearly £35k in green bonuses – a 50% increase on 2017.

A recent review of our car fleet profile and emissions has found that the efficiency of our fleet has improved by 3% since 2015. This is due to the 120gCO₂/km emissions cap we continue to impose on cars on our company car list. Whilst the absolute volume of our carbon emissions relating to transport has increased since 2015, this reflects our growing business and increasing number of drivers. When we compare average emissions per vehicles between 2015 and 2018, we see a 10% reduction.

2019 will see an increased focus on improving the efficiency of our company car fleet and the personally-owned cars that our people use for company purposes.

We are currently in the process of setting ourselves new and even more challenging carbon targets, which will place us on a trajectory to be a zero emissions – or even carbon positive – business by 2050 at the latest.

Carbon Trust Standard

We are one of the only contractors to hold The Carbon Trust Standard. Companies which achieve the Standard must show continuous improvement over a three year period. We were recertified in 2019.

Carbon Trust Supply Chain Standard

In 2015 we were one of just seven companies to achieve Level 1 of the Carbon Trust’s Supply Chain Standard – the world’s only accreditation for companies managing emissions from their supply chain – and in 2018 we were one of only a handful of to achieve Level 2. We did this by using the knowledge we’d gained as a holder of the Carbon Trust Standard to show two of our highest-impact supply chain partners how to make energy-spend savings of approximately 30%. 2019 will see us working to achieve Level 3.

Renewable energy
In 2016 we signed a deal to power all our offices where we are responsible for energy procurement, with natural renewable energy. By the end of 2018, all of our new construction sites (where we are responsible for providing power supplies) were powered by natural renewable (nuclear-free) energy too.