Reducing our waste and material consumption

With the world's resources being depleted at unsustainable rates and landfill space in the UK rapidly filling up, we're paying more attention to the lifecycle of raw materials used in our business, with a strategy to decouple material consumption from business growth and move towards a circular economy.

We’ve maintained our achievement of zero waste to landfill for all the ‘hub’ and food waste generated in our offices since 2012. Any materials not recovered are sent to generate energy through incineration. We also aim to reduce our consumption of key consumables - by 2023 we had reduced paper consumption by 77% and water by 19% compared to 2019 levels. By 2025 we aim to go further, with stretch targets to reduce consumption of paper by 80%. We’ve also set aspirational goals to reduce our waste volumes by 50% compared to 2019, and to reuse or recycle 90% of our operational waste, eliminating incineration, wherever possible.

By 2023, our total waste consumption had dropped by 60% since 2019, surpassing our -50% target, with 92% of our waste being reused or recycled, exceeding our 90% target.

Much of the remaining 8% not currently reused or recycled stems from non-recyclable items such as composite packaging. We’re engaging stakeholders to identify potential solutions for this, but expect it to take time.

Our approach

We developed a long-term, waste and material consumption strategy that progressively adopts the principles of the ‘circular economy’ – reducing, reusing, recycling and transitioning to circular solutions. We implement this ‘Going Circular’ strategy via a combination of waste management, employee awareness and supplier engagement, collaborating to find and pioneer better solutions. The programme is underpinned by the top-down waste reduction and recycling targets referenced above, and is set out, phase by phase, together with the lessons we've learned so far, in a published document which you can download.

We also run campaigns as part of a dedicated programme to educate and engage our people about related issues and opportunities, and the action they can take.

We're applying the principles of the circular economy to transform our approach to waste

Visit our Going Circular site to see the story so far

Programmes

Reducing
Reusing
Recycling
Circular solutions
Valuing our impact

Reducing

Our waste strategy begins with reducing the materials we consume. Originally, we focused on our paper and water consumption, but we have increasingly been looking for ways to reduce our other material usage, working with suppliers to reduce the impact of everything we buy.

Reusing

When products come to the end of their first life, we first look to see if they can be reused rather than disposing of them. For example, we’ve set up initiatives that enable us to maximise reuse of our old IT, unwanted office furniture and the uniforms worn by suppliers working on our sites.

Recycling

We invested in recycling hubs in our coffee areas and removed all desk-side rubbish bins over a decade ago. And since then we’ve continued to refine how we segregate our waste and provide innovative recycling solutions to maximise our reuse and recycling. We've set out more details on these hubs and our ‘Let’s Talk Rubbish’ employee engagement campaign - designed to maximise segregation and minimise contamination - in our Going Circular Lessons Learned.

Circular solutions

We’re also looking at the broader challenge of moving to a circular economy and pioneering solutions with lower environmental impact, wherever possible.

We’d already established a system with suppliers in our More London and Embankment Place offices, so that our archive paper is securely shredded and recycled into paper towels that we can use in our washrooms. But to improve on this ‘downcycling’ we now divert our waste office paper to a state-of-the-art recycling facility that uses no virgin wood, and significantly less water and energy than other recycled paper. It can reuse the paper fibres up to 20 times – three times more than the market standard.

We send our food waste to either anaerobic digestion or composting, depending on local processing facilities, so that it is turned into useful by-products. And to address the fact that the UK is currently lacking the infrastructure to support the decomposition of plant-based food packaging, we’ve introduced ceramic glasses and mugs across all our buildings and replaced the compostable cups that were used to date.

We’re now exploring better end-of-life solutions for additional hard-to-treat waste streams, such as stationery and foil-backed food packaging, as well as embedding ‘Going Circular’ thinking and innovation into more key supplier contracts to allow us to move towards fully ‘circular procurement’.

Valuing our impact

We not only assess our operational performance relating to materials, but also the impact on society, using our TIMM framework. We valued the adverse impact on society from our waste at £6.6m, much of which occurs outside of our direct operations. We’re continuing to work with our suppliers to reduce this impact, where we can.