“Our objective has been to improve our environmental performance particularly in respect of energy consumption, water usage and recycling.”
Ken Clunie
Head of Administration UK
This year has been a challenging one for my team in Administration in supporting our climate change policies. In London, our objective has been to improve our environmental performance particularly in respect of energy consumption, water usage and recycling.
Increasing energy demand arising from a growing business and our technology platform have put pressure on the ability of the public electricity system to supply the London Sugar Quay building.
A desire to meet those demands in ways that are both environmentally sound and economically viable has led us to invest more than $2.4 million over the past few months in a new Tri-Gen System for our Sugar Quay office. This technology, uses very efficient gas-fired generators to produce base load electricity for the building. By recovering the waste heat from the generator exhausts to provide hot water for the building and also by using a chemical process called ‘absorption chilling’ to produce chilled water from the hot exhaust to supplement air conditioning. In this way, we make maximum use of the energy used in generating the power. We also continue, particularly for our London and Swiss offices, to make ever greater use of ‘green’ tariffs for our public electricity supplies.
My team also looks after procurement and recycling: I am pleased to report continued progress in both areas, with a significant increase in the amount of waste recycled mainly from the recycling of cardboard and food waste. My colleagues have also extended our recycling programmes in our offices in Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong and Chicago.
This year we announced plans for the development of our new London Headquarters where we hope to move late 2010/early 2011, with a key element being a commitment to energy efficiency and environmental responsibility. I look forward to continuing work with our Corporate Responsibility team in this and related areas to deliver further improvements over the coming year.