Measuring our performance against objectives
For the second year running, the board of directors set challenging environmental objectives as part of Tube Lines’ suite of annual business objectives. Progress against the business objectives is reported regularly to all employees.
We met and exceeded all three of the environmental objectives – energy consumption at Tube Lines premises and Piccadilly line depots, paper use across the company and fuel efficiency of our largest commercial road vehicles.
These objectives covered the period between 7 January 2007 and 5 January 2008 and sought an improvement against performance in the same period in the previous year.
We asked Deloitte to provide independent assurance on our key environmental performance indicators to assure those outside the company that our data is robust and to help us identify ways to improve our data capture. Deloitte provided assurance over legal compliance, complaints, commendations, incidents, inspections, internal and external audits, utility consumption and waste generation.
The assurance process has highlighted areas for improvement in relation to our measurement of paper consumption and fuel efficiency. In the first half of 2006, we manually recorded paper consumption and these records, which we use as a baseline, are not as robust as our current automated records. Our fuel efficiency objective calculated the total mileage of our largest road vehicles per gallon of fuel taken from Tube Lines’ fuel tanks only. We are currently unable to identify how much fuel these vehicles draw from external supplies. We welcome these findings and will respond in 2008, further refining our data collection and internal validation processes.
For more information refer to the independent assurance statement.
2007 Objectives
Objective: Reduce energy consumption at Tube Lines premises and Piccadilly line depots by 2 per cent by the end of 2007
Achieved: 20 per cent reduction
Tube Lines is responsible for energy and utilities use and the resulting payments for our premises at 15 Westferry Circus in Canary Wharf and satellite offices in Stratford.
This objective targeted a reduction in energy consumption at our premises and the Piccadilly line depots and followed a 2007 objective to reduce energy use at our 24-hour operational head office. We made the decision to include the Piccadilly line depots in this business objective as we directly manage activities at these depots even though we do not pay the utility bills here. Electricity bills and meters readings are reviewed monthly to keep track of consumption. We set a conservative target of 2 per cent but our efforts to reduce energy, including adjusting air conditioning and lighting, restricting lifts and doors out of hours and getting people to switch off their computers, really paid off as we achieved a 20 per cent reduction over the year.
| Year | |
| Energy use at Tube Lines premises and Piccadilly line depots, kWh | |
| 2006 | 12,983,963 |
| 2007 | 10,390,002 |
Read the Energy and Utilities section of this report to find out more about how we are working to reduce energy and utility consumption.
Objective: Reduce white A4 paper usage by 15 per cent by the end of 2007
Achieved: 34 per cent reduction
This objective built upon last year’s efforts to reduce paper use at head office. It targeted a reduction in A4 paper use across the whole company (of all the paper we used for printing, faxing and copying in 2007, consumption of A4 white paper accounted for approximately 90 per cent). We introduced a robust measurement for paper in the second half of 2006 and monitor paper consumption every four weeks to check the success of measures employed to reduce paper use. This includes converting printers to default to double side printing and rationalising supply. Prior to the introduction of our automated monitoring system, we manually recorded paper use and procurement.
| Year | |
| Paper use, A4 paper reams | |
| 2006 | 35,114 |
| 2007 | 23,131 |
Read the Waste and Materials section of this report to find out more about how we decreased paper use and manage waste generation and disposal.
Objective: Improve fuel efficiency of our commercial road fleet over 7.5 tonnes by 5 per cent by the end of 2007
Achieved: 15 per cent improvement
Tube Lines Distribution Services Management (DSM) team operates a road fleet of 1,600 vehicles. This objective targeted an improvement in the fuel efficiency of its largest vehicles. These vehicles are required to refuel using Tube Lines’ private fuel pumps so that we can monitor usage. However, in some circumstances, vehicles find it necessary to refuel elsewhere. DSM measured the total miles driven by the vehicles per gallon of fuel taken from our fuel tanks. Every four weeks the amount of fuel drawn was compared to the total distance covered by the vehicles to monitor how successful the introduction of a global positioning system (GPS), restrictions for idling and driver training were in improving fuel efficiency.
| Year | |
| Fuel efficiency of road vehicles over 7.5 tonnes | |
| 2006 | 12.28 mpg |
| 2007 | 14.16 mpg |
Read the Pollution section of this report to find out more about how we improved fuel efficiency and prevent pollution.
2008 Objectives
In 2006 the board of directors recommended that our 2008 environmental business objective should target a reduction in Tube Lines’ carbon footprint. In 2007 efforts were focused on calculating our carbon footprint. In conjunction with the Carbon Trust and AEA Energy and Environment we identified that our activities generate 78,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Read the Climate change section of this report to find out more about how we measured our carbon footprint.
The 2008 environmental business objective is to reduce our carbon footprint by 5,000 tonnes, equivalent to approximately 6 per cent, by the end of the year. A range of improvements are scheduled to be implemented throughout the year and will be monitored every four weeks to ensure the target is met.
