Law In Business: Emission statement

30 November 2006

Taking steps to reduce a firm’s carbon footprint is as good for business as it is for the planet. Richard Bate looks at leading City firms’ green policies and asks what more can be done to protect the environment.
 

Climate change has grown from being an occasional scare story to one of the most serious issues facing society today. All three major UK political parties now consider tackling climate change a priority — and are prepared to use ‘green’ taxes to do so — telling us it is now part of the political mainstream.

So with business leaders and individuals under pressure to reduce their environmental impact, what can the legal profession do to keep up with a world where being ‘green’ is as important as ‘lean and mean’?

For evidence of how law firms are adapting, you need look no further than the top 10 firms in the UK, from which no fewer than six put environmental concerns at the heart of their corporate social responsibility policies.

Take Allen & Overy’s (A&O’s) high profile move to new energy-efficient City offices in Spitalfields, where almost 500 solar panels have been integrated into the building’s roof and promise to save 67 tonnes of carbon being released into the atmosphere each year.

The firm estimates the panels will generate enough clean energy annually to make three million cups of ‘green’ tea and two million slices of toast (or just over three guilt-free cuppas and two slices of toast a day for each of its 2,400 London employees).

This measure neatly avoids gimmickry by being placed in the context of a policy of conservation from the ground up in A&O’s offices. Litigation partner Andrew Clark says: "It is the small things that make a difference, so we have ensured every office has two bins — one for rubbish and one for recycling — and we have provided space for 400 bicycles."

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has also applied its aptitude for numbers to reducing its environmental impact.

It has been calculating the amount of carbon dioxide its offices produce since 2004 and now sources a third of its energy needs from renewable sources. A raft of practical measures, such as adjusting light timer settings and using energy-efficient lifts, also help to reduce the amount of energy the firm uses.

The ‘offset’ approach that Freshfields has adopted, reducing carbon emissions by switching to renewables, is becoming an increasingly popular policy in corporate Britain.

In fact, a number of companies have sprung up that advise businesses on how they can become more environmentally friendly. These include The Carbon Neutral Company, which was recently name-checked in Al Gore’s climate change film An Inconvenient Truth. The company’s roll call of legal clients includes Pinsent Masons, Mishcon de Reya and SJ Berwin, and it helps to assess and tackle their carbon emissions through a combination of green energy and forestry projects.

This approach made SJ Berwin the world’s first carbon-neutral law firm, offsetting 1,700 tonnes of carbon every year since 2001. This was accomplished as part of an awareness-raising campaign among the firm’s employees and peers designed to highlight the ethical and business cases for tackling climate change.

Fundamentally, however, switching to alternative energy sources only addresses the ‘supply’ issue, with the big savings lying in measures to reduce the daily energy demand among firms and employees. These are often indistinguishable from simple cost-cutting measures, such as turning lights off when leaving a room and turning PCs off at night. As a carbon offender, the PC is almost up there with the 4x4 car. A survey by the National Energy Foundation revealed that PCs left on 24 hours a day in UK workplaces produce as much carbon dioxide as 120,000 ‘Chelsea tractors’.

Yet however much we try to avoid the issue, minimising climate change will inevitably involve us getting over what even George W Bush calls our ‘addiction to oil’ — especially petrol.

Transport accounts for a quarter of all UK carbon emissions, so looking for ways to cut the amount of work-associated travel seems sensible. Many firms, such as Reed Smith, use conference and video-calling as a method of reducing the number of non-essential meetings their lawyers attend. And for occasions where long distance or even international travel is required, the offset approach is useful. It is already used by Pinsents, which offsets all work-related air travel as part of a strategy which builds the ‘carbon cost’ of doing business into its financial systems as well as its corporate social responsibility objectives.

Truly tackling transport emissions, however, will involve firms taking positive action to reduce the impact of commuting. The average UK worker commutes 19 miles to work and, though moves to promote car-sharing and encourage public transport use are laudable, these are difficult to achieve for firms in regions with poor public transport or dispersed workforces.

Here, the answer might well lie in making radical decisions about what and who needs to be in the office at all. Giving employees, especially non-client facing support workers, the opportunity to work from home is good for the fabled work-life balance, while eliminating the carbon cost of commuting. It is also much easier to achieve in a world of cheap broadband and remote servers.

And just as carbon offsetting exists to provide a much-needed ‘quick fix’ measure, firms’ commuting emissions could even be reduced by increasing the amount of support work outsourced to third-partycompaniessupplyingservices through a network of home-based teleworkers. This not only cuts down on the carbon cost of workers commuting often long distances to work, but also on the associated environmental and financial expense — in terms of lighting, heating and other energy costs — of running a large office.

The average support worker produces 1.3 tonnes of carbon each year simply by travelling to and from work every day. This means that if a firm with 60 support staff enabled a third of them to work from home, or chose outsourcing as an alternative, it would reduce its carbon footprint by 26 tonnes through this measure alone — as long as their homeworkers do not leave their PCs on standby.

The message that becoming greener will, ultimately, be as good for business as it is for the planet is already being understood by firms with an environ-mental specialism and those that work on behalf of the public sector.

Westminster-based practice Campbell Hooper developed a detailed environmental policy after realising its commercial benefits. Environmental policy partner Annette Fritze-Shanks says: "We work with many local authorities on regeneration projects and find that having solid sustainable credentials counts as a plus-point when pitching for business. An increasing number of businesses also see it as a positive selling point.

"As more laws come on to the statute book demanding business becomes more environmentally accountable, it makes sense to stay ahead of the game. Implementing a proper recycling plan or working out how to dispose of spent dictation handset batteries now means you will not have to rush these things through when they become compulsory."

In conclusion, the legal profession, like the rest of the business world, has a duty to reduce the impact its activities have on the environment. Whether this will come about by choice or regulation remains to be seen, but there are already examples of firms whose contribution towards cleaning up the planet extends beyond occasional environmental pro bono work.

Saving the planet begins at home; and while turning off a PC at the end of the day and taking the bus to work may seem like small steps, replicated a million times over they can make a big difference.

Richard Bate is general manager of outsourced transcription specialist voicepath.
Author: Richard Bate
Source: Legal Week