Climate Change & Environment
Public transport makes an important contribution to reducing emissions from travel. Buses and trains produce fewer emissions per passenger kilometre than other forms of transport such as car or air travel. Our role is to provide public transport that supports communities and their economies while also helping to improve quality of life through lower air emissions and congestion and low-carbon travel options.
Our environmental management programme is led by the Group Head of Environment (supported by a Senior Environmental Manager in North America) and by environmental representatives across the business. Our operating companies all work to minimum environmental standards covering regulatory requirements and identified environmental impacts against which they are periodically audited.
In the UK all our operating companies have gained accreditation to the environmental management system standard ISO14001. This year we also achieved the Carbon Trust Standard in the UK in recognition of our efforts to reduce carbon emissions across all our operations. All our train operating companies are working towards BS EN16001 which they hope to achieve in the coming year.
Our commitment to reduce our carbon emissions and associated targets is set out in our Climate Change Strategy (PDF, 1.4mb). We drive improvements in environmental performance through our Small Changes, Big Difference campaign by sharing best practice and encouraging employees to improve environmental performance. This initiative has been instrumental in cutting energy use in buildings and improving recycling levels.
In this section you can find out about how we are cutting carbon emissions from vehicles, buildings, business travel and our supply chain. Performance trends and data can be found here.
We continue to invest in new vehicles which meet more stringent emissions standards. Further details can be found in this section. Emissions data can be found here.
Water is primarily used for cleaning our vehicles and train units to maintain a level of customer satisfaction in service quality. Further details can be found in this section. Water usage data can be found here.
In this section we set out how we continue to work with our waste management contactors to reduce waste arising and increase our recycling rate. Relevant data can be found here.
