Environment
Reducing carbon emissions and waste within the core business and encouraging wider groups of stakeholders to do the same.
We set the highest environmental performance and improvement standards. Increasingly we are engaging with our stakeholders to raise environmental awareness and work with them to reduce carbon emissions across our supply chains.
Objectives and Approach
Unipart’s environmental objectives are to meet or exceed minimum legal requirements, measure impacts and set targets for improvement in the areas of: Energy, Waste Management, Carbon Emissions and Water Usage.
Responsibility for the environment is embedded into core business processes, and all levels of management – from directors to team leaders – are responsible for proactively assessing and minimising environmental risks as part of their normal operations. Cross divisional forums are in place to spread best practice in energy, water and waste management.
We encourage all employees to raise their awareness of environmental issues and to take personal responsibility to minimise adverse environmental impacts of their activities.
Benefits
Unipart has achieved significant benefits from embedding environmental strategy into its core business processes:
- Spreading best practice via a common approach and standard processes
- Improved environmental awareness within the business
- Increased ownership for environmental improvement
- Ensuring legislative compliance
- Credibility with existing and new business clients
- Reducing carbon footprint from use of energy, water and transport
- Reducing emissions from landfill by increasing waste recycling
Unipart sets annual improvement targets for carbon emissions and, over the last three years (2005-2008), can demonstrate an overall reduction of 8%.
Case Studies
Energy Management systems have been introduced in a number of sites, allowing energy to be monitored and controlled half-hourly at the cell or work-group level. This provides information on historical usage giving an opportunity to monitor energy management as part of daily operations. For example, this has helped reduce annual gas usage in Unipart’s largest site from 5.8m kWh in 2006 to 3.3m kWh in 2008.
The global freight team for Jaguar was looking to minimise the quantity of products transported via air freight to the USA in order to reduce costs in transport and resulting carbon emissions. The solution was not to eliminate airfreight altogether, rather, as a result of planning inventory movement, to allow air freight to be used as a method of fulfilling tight lead times as opposed to being the ‘easy freight option’. By decreasing the weight of goods air freighted The Global Freight team was able to achieve a reduction in excess of 90% in carbon emissions compared to the previous year.
Carbon studies of supply chains have been carried out to understand where energy is being consumed. One part of the Group highlighted that most of its emissions in their own supply chain resulted from transport. As a result they have worked constructively with their transport provider to make a number of improvements to reduce emissions.
To read our Responsibility for the Environment document, click here.
