Environment
Sodexo recognises its responsibility to the environment and strives to achieve environmental best practice. This is a global, national and local issue for Sodexo. Not only is legislation being strengthened, our clients' requirements for environmental management is increasing.
Sodexo is not a major direct polluter. Our greatest impact is through our use of fuel, energy, our consumption of water and the waste associated with our businesses.
Energy use and carbon emissions
On behalf of the client we operate almost exclusively on other people's premises. This means that our control over energy and water use and waste disposal is severely restricted, and demonstrating savings from energy efficiency and waste minimisation initiatives is extremely difficult. Nonetheless we are striving to improve the monitoring and management of our environmental performance. We collect energy data for our main offices, sites where we purchase the energy of behalf of the client and for Tillery Valley Foods. Based on our use of electricity drawn from the grid and of natural gas, we have calculated the resultant emission of COČ - the major greenhouse gas associated with climate change - as shown in the table below:
Last year we made a commitment to move 80% of our offices and sites where we control consumption to 'green energy' which results in zero COČ, as defined by Defra. By the end of October 2006 we had increased this to 97%. Switching to green energy, supplied by Good Quality Combined Heat and Power (GQCHP) has resulted in a reduction of 738 tonnes of COČ emissions for the reporting period and will significantly reduce our COČ emmisions for the next reporting period.
View the Corporate Environmental Policy Statement for Sodexo UK & Ireland. For more information please view our latest Corporate Responsibility Report.