Airmax Group is committed to promoting sustainability. Concern for the environment and promoting a broader sustainability agenda are integral to Airmax’s professional activities and the management of the organisation. We aim to follow and to promote good sustainability practice, to reduce the environmental impacts of all our activities and to help our clients and partners to do the same.
Related to our Environmental Policy, our Sustainability Policy outlines sustainability considerations within our business decisions, with a plan of how to prevent issues arising.
Practice what we preach – Maintain the brand
Carbon Matters is an Airmax Group company and brand that represents the activities undertaken by Airmax in investing in technology to find and develop alternative energy or emission reduction projects.
Our aim is to:
- Identify, understand, verify and offer monitoring technology that helps reduce green house gases including CO2.
- Design environmentally friendly energy systems, including methods and procedures for their efficient use by remote telemetry
Benefits of a Sustainability Policy
Airmax accepts that implementation of a Sustainability Policy may require some initial investment to change the way our business operates. We need to change the way we think. However, this investment should be quickly recouped due to savings from new found efficiency, energy savings and work opportunities and allow us to:
- Meet current environmentally related legislation.
- Monitor and review progress in reducing consumption of resources
- Save money in terms of consumption, waste and recycling.
- Increase efficiency throughout our supply chain
- Differentiate us from the competition.
- Embrace environmental technology and control systems
- Insulate buildings
- Remove dependency from all forms of ‘grid’ supplies and become self sustaining where possible.
- Look at alternative energy in the form of:
- Solar
- FIT tariffs
- Storage
- Hybrids
- Heat pumps and exchangers
- Hydrogen fuel
- Waste capture
- Rain water
- Improve reputation with stakeholders.
- Set standards to comply with ISO 9001 quality management standard
Sustainability is the convergence of three distinct areas:
- Social sustainability
- Economic sustainability
- Environmental sustainability
Within each area, we have specific goals and targets.
We recognise the importance of delivering goods and services fit purpose.
To deliver our goals and strategies we will:
- Set continuous improvement targets by which our performance can be measured, demonstrated and publicly reported
- Identify opportunities and take action where practicable to improve sustainability and to meet legal obligations
- Identify and mitigate adverse impacts and risks
- Embed sustainability policy and practice into all of our management systems for operating, maintaining, renewing and improving.
- Provide the right level of advice, awareness and competency to our people and to our contractors’ employees.
- Reducing the levels of both direct and indirect pollution associated with Airmax activities.
Principles
Our Sustainability Policy is based upon the following principles:
- To comply with, and exceed where practicable, all applicable legislation, regulations and codes of practice.
- To integrate sustainability considerations into all our business decisions.
- To ensure that all staff are fully aware of our Sustainability Policy and are committed to implementing and improving it.
- To minimise the impact on sustainability of all office and transportation activities.
- To make clients and suppliers aware of our Sustainability Policy, and encourage them to adopt sound sustainable management practices
- To review, annually report, and to continually strive to improve our sustainability performance.
Practical steps
In order to put these principles into practice we will:
Travel and meetings
- Walk, cycle and/or use public transport to attend meetings, site visits etc, apart from in exceptional circumstances where the alternatives are impractical and/or cost prohibitive.
- Include the full costs of more sustainable forms of transport in our financial proposals, rather than the least cost option which may involve travelling by car or air. Where the only practical alternative is to fly, we will include costs for full air fares rather than budget airlines in our financial proposals, and appropriate offsets.
- Avoid physically travelling to meetings etc where alternatives are available and practical, such as using teleconferencing, video conferencing or web cams, and efficient timing of meetings to avoid multiple trips. These options are also often more time efficient, while not sacrificing the benefits of regular contact with clients and partners.
- To reduce the need to travel to meetings and elsewhere, and facilitate regular client contact, we will provide a web cam to clients free of charge for the duration of a project where appropriate.
- Reduce the need for our staff to travel by supporting alternative working arrangements, including home working etc, and promote the use of public transport by locating our offices in accessible locations.
- Use Profleet2 for all emissions recording scheme for business travel to monitor our impact. www.profleet2.com.
Purchase of equipment and consumption of resources
- Minimise our use of paper and other office consumables, for example by double-siding all paper used, and identifying opportunities to reduce waste.
- As far as possible arrange for the reuse or recycling of office waste, including paper, packaging, computer supplies and redundant equipment.
- Reduce the energy consumption of office equipment by purchasing energy efficient equipment and good housekeeping.
- Plan to come off the grid with renewable energies built into short term plans.
- Ensure that timber furniture and any other timber products are recycled or from well-managed, sustainable sources and are Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.
- Purchase fair-trade and/or organic beverages.
- Look at food and air miles on all supplies not just price.
