Our corporate responsibility

One percent for the Planet

Terrafiniti LLP is a member of 1% for the Planet, an alliance of businesses that donate at least 1% of their annual revenues to environmental organisations worldwide.

Members of 1% for the Planet recognise that environmental social sustainability requires actions and activity beyond the direct influence of their organisations and that the future of their business relies upon healthy and viable societies and ecosystems.

As of September 2010, 1% for the Planet has 1,320 member companies across 38 countries, see more >>

Sustainability statement

Our sutainability commitment goes much further than compliance with environmental legislation relevant to our activities. Terrafiniti also actively works to:

• Pursue continuous improvements in environmental performance
• Reduce resource and energy use and promote re-use and recycling
• Ensure procurement follows sustainability principles throughout the supply chain including using environmentally beneficial or benign suppliers and sourcing local suppliers
• Identify and reduce any environmental risks related to our activities
• Work with suppliers to minimise their environmental impact
• Support charitable organisations through our membership of One Percent for the Planet
• Offset our carbon emissions where it is not possible to eliminate business travel and resource use through a recognised best practice scheme.

Environmental management

Travel

• We have an active strategy to minimise travel requirements, making full use of information technology for communication and the exchange of material.
  
• Where travel is essential journeys are planned to minimise the use of resources.
• Public transport is the preferred means of travel wherever possible. Cars are only used where necessary and when the use of public transport would add significantly to the time project costs of the client.
• We use modern regularly serviced vehicles to minimise vehicle emissions. Catalyst-equipped petrol vehicles are used. Although these have higher CO2 emissions than diesel, the particulate (PM10, PM5 etc) and smoke emissions are lower and the overall emission of human carcinogens is thought to be lower.
  
• Where air travel is required we seek appropriate methods of carbon offsetting.

Resource use

• We have an active no-paper duplication policy. All internal filing and documents are produced and stored electronically.
• All printed business stationery is produced using an in-house print on demand system so excess stock is not produced. All paper used is printed with water-based inks, double-sided and is 100% PCW recycled. A small quantity of non-recycled paper is sometimes used for external colour printing where print quality and/or wastage are affected by recycled stock. All consumable items are sent for re-engineering through charitable schemes wherever possible.
• All office equipment purchased conforms to the best available environmental and ergonomic standards.
• Where possible energy in our offices is purchased from recognised "green energy" suppliers. Full power saving features are enabled on our computer and printing systems and equipment not in use is turned off to avoid 'hidden' energy consumption.

Carbon offsetting

Carbon offsetting has become a major and at times controversial aspect of organisational responses to the challenges of climate change. We believe that, combined with a genuine approach to minimising emissions at source, offsetting can be a valuable approach to addressing carbon impacts.

Many criticisms of off-setting focus upon its use as a means to avoid taking action to improve energy efficiency or reduce direct impacts. Terrafiniti believes that without a focus upon at source minimisation, off-setting can legitimately be seen as greenwash. This is why we see it as a "last resort", to address the emissions that remain following efficiency measures and active carbon reduction activities. In addition, there is a huge variety of off-sets available, some of which have been criticised as not leading to the development of new renewable energy production.

We believe that a responsible approach to such criticism is to off-set our residual carbon impacts through a recognised and reputable off-setting provider. At the time of writing (April 2012) we are identifying and recording our carbon emissions and are exploring offsetting through an organisation recommended by a number of leading NGOs, the Gold Standard >>