About us
Our Issues
Waste and resources
Our goal is to make sure we reduce the amount of resources we use, and that we reuse and recycle more of the things that we currently throw away. This will be helped by the introduction of a new Environmental Management System (EMS) based on accreditation to ISO14001 (a universally recognised environmental standard) that we are planning to begin implementing this year. This is being underpinned by rigorous benchmarking so that we can put in place a robust continuous improvement process.
Using less
We currently get through 6,000 tonnes of paper every year for marketing and 32 tonnes in our offices. We're overhauling our reprographic policies which will lead to reductions in paper usage and we're also looking to swap to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified and recycled paper sources, especially in relation to marketing. We also did some baseline measurements around our water consumption and worked out that we consumed 140,089m3 of water in 2007. We'll be keeping a close eye on our monthly consumption figures over 2008 relative to our 2007 baseline to ascertain how and where we need to make reductions.
Recycling more
We recently launched a recycling trial at our Head Office in Hook that will see all desk bins replaced by colour-coded stations for the recycling of plastic cups & bottles, paper, cans, glass, and general waste. If it works then we'll roll the scheme out to the next 50 biggest corporate sites across our estate (with more to follow). We aim to achieve a minimum of 15% recycling of waste produced by weight/volume by the end of the 3 month-long pilot.
We know we've got to apply the same principles to our customer equipment, all of which conforms to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive. This means our customers can return any old equipment and we'll dispose of it free of charge. Virgin Mobile also run a handset recycling scheme that gives customers the chance to donate the value of their phone to charity, with the money raised match-funded by the company.
Responsible packaging
We've looked into the packaging of our products and made some improvements including reducing our new cable wireless router packaging by around 50% and replacing the plastic foam end caps in our V+ Box packaging with reusable cardboard cartons.
