Environmental regulation
Our activities are covered by a number of environmental regulations as discussed in the section The markets we operate in.
Climate change
We have made good progress in implementing a comprehensive climate change programme. This includes fuel and energy efficiency initiatives, support for effective policy measures to address absolute emissions growth, voluntary carbon offsetting and support for scientific research.
We have developed a company-wide target to improve carbon efficiency, expressed in grams of CO2 per passenger kilometre (gCO2/pkm), by 25 per cent from 111 grams in 2005 to 83 grams in 2025. In 2007 our performance was 110 gCO2/pkm.
CO2 emissions actual and targeted
This goal is now one of our overall corporate goals, signalling the importance of climate change to our business (What the future holds).
During the year we have carried out an extensive assessment of our carbon footprint, applying the greenhouse gases (GHG) protocol corporate standard guidelines. Our carbon footprint in 2007/08 was 17.7 million tonnes.
In January 2008, we launched a significant upgrade to our passenger carbon offset scheme introducing a ‘one click’ highly visible option into the britishairways.com booking process. This scheme helps fund UN certified emission reduction initiatives in developing countries, such as clean energy projects in China and Brazil.
We continue to work to secure the timely and pragmatic inclusion of aviation CO2 emissions into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme in preference to aviation taxes which we believe are ineffective in tackling climate change. We are actively leading the development of a global agreement in aviation climate policy – both within industry (e.g. at IATA and AEA and as a leading member of the UK Sustainable Aviation Group) and in broader global forums such as the World Economic Forum and the Gleneagles Climate Change Dialogue, and the European Round Table of Industrialists.
We are also supporting a number of climate change scientific research projects. These include work led by Cambridge University to investigate research pathways for improving understanding of non-CO2 aircraft climate effects, the European Commission IAGOS project which is investigating the feasibility of using aircraft to collect atmospheric data in-flight and work by the Global Canopy Programme to prevent deforestation – a large source of climate change emissions.
Waste
The total amount of waste managed through contracts at Heathrow and Gatwick has decreased by 3.3 per cent during the year. We continue to develop new waste management initiatives including recycling waxed paper coffee cups, plastic lids, unwanted office furniture and recycling newspapers offered onboard.
In 2007 we recycled 30 per cent of waste at Heathrow and Gatwick. We have set ourselves the target of recycling half our waste by 2010.
The proportion of waste at Heathrow and Gatwick disposed to landfill reduced by 9.2 per cent. We continue to work towards a target of zero waste to landfill by 2010.
Water
Water is a valuable resource and consumption is routinely monitored whenever possible. During the year, we cut water consumption at Heathrow and Gatwick by 8.8 per cent compared to the previous year.