Environmental Management within the Authority
Caring for the environment is at the heart of what we do every day. Good environmental management has been central to our work and that of our volunteers and members for many years.
We recognise that as an organisation we cause environmental impacts through our ‘operational activities’ i.e. the energy and water we use within our buildings, travel undertaken as a result of business activities, the waste we produce and collect, goods and service we purchase and the management of the land for which we are directly responsible. Our environmental management policy sets out what we want to achieve in each of these areas.
While working to achieve the policy aims we set targets on an annual basis; see a summary of our 2009 targets and performance include comparsion with last year.
We have also implemented many measures and made some improvements, some of which are described in our Annual Environmental Report (2008-09) (811KB) 
and our Annual Performance Report (113KB)
Key achievements
This year’s key achievements include:
- reducing our total Carbon Footprint by 9%
- reducing our total carbon emissions by 89 tonnes
- reducing our building gas use by an equivalent of 48 tonnes of carbon
- decreasing staff business travel in their own cars cutting emissions by almost 20%
- increasing the total tonnage of waste recycled by the Authority from 28% to 30%
- reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill by 8 tonnes
More detail of the practical measures we are putting into place
