Over the last year, we have taken significant steps to drive forward the environmental agenda within our organisation. Building on a range of environmental initiatives, we have recognised the need to integrate these into a "business as usual" approach and coordinate them at a business wide level.

Attached below is our third external report addressing our activities and progress in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field - published September 2005.

  Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2005 
 (Adobe Version 7 PDF - 2.88Mb)
This version is accessible to users with screen readers and other non visual reading devices.

  Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2005 
 (Adobe Version 5 PDF - 3.02Mb)

Click here to access our 2004 CSR Report and our 2003 Health, Safety and Environment Report.

The Royal Mail environmental policy 

Our values
We are firmly committed to increasing both our profitability and brand value, but our commercial needs shall aim to strike a balance with environmental, quality of life and social equity considerations.

We recognises that our business activities and policies have impacts on the environment. We shall take full account of the environmental effects of our policies in our planning, decision making and day to day activities.

We recognise and value our unique position in society which ensues from:

• Our heritage
• Our trusted brands
• Our nationwide coverage through our branches and delivery services.

Protection of this unique position and maintaining positive stakeholder relationships are integral to our business and we shall aim to clearly demonstrate that we are an environmentally responsible company.

We are committed to the principle of sustainable Development. We will seek to contribute to national and local sustainable development policy aims. By enhancing economies, acting with social responsibility and minimising our impact on the environment we can help create a world in which our company can flourish now and for generations to come.

Our Policy Objectives
The overall objective of the environmental policy is to evaluate and seek to reduce our environmental impacts. The policy objectives may be summarised as follows:-

• The progressive integration of environmental and social considerations into business decisions and to establish relevant performance indicators along with key measures and associated improvement targets.
• The development and implementation of management frameworks that ensure high standards of environmental performance.
• To comply with all relevant environmental legislation and regulations and endeavour to meet and exceed appropriate environmental good practice standards.
• To promote transparency by having clear environmental accountabilities and publish relevant information about our environmental performance on an annual basis.
• To reduce consumption of materials in our operations, reuse rather than dispose whenever possible and promote recycling and the use of recycled materials.
• To promote the prudent use of fuel, energy, water, raw materials and other resources, including progressively increasing our use of renewable energy sources.
• To minimise waste and discharges to surface or ground water.
• To reduce wherever practicable the level of harmful emissions from our vehicles, buildings and equipment.
  
• To encourage the implementation by all employees of sound environmental practices, providing training where appropriate and include environmental issues in discussion with our employee representatives and stakeholder groups.
• To support through our community programmes the promotion of active environmental management with relevant external groups and organisations.
• To work with our suppliers to minimise the impact of their operations through a partnership approach to our purchasing policy and to develop, where practical, new products and services, which seek to achieve greater sustainability.

Scope
All our employees have a responsibility to support the aims and implementation of the Environmental Policy. This policy applies throughout the Group.

Communication and implementation
This policy will be progressively communicated and implemented throughout the business by establishing a network of environmentally competent persons, using existing business processes where appropriate.

Our vision 

Our environmental policy forms a starting point and one that we are already moving forward on. In addition, the document below outlines our five stage vision to move us towards corporate sustainable development, of which we are already in the second stage.

  Five stage CSR vision (PDF - 75Kb)

Our targets 

We recognise the need to demonstrate that we are continually improving and to measure our performance on the journey towards corporate sustainability. We have set 6 core targets that reflect our major environmental impacts. We are committed to reporting on performance against these targets and the challenge starts here:

Our environmental targets

• A reduction in overall energy consumption for building use by 10% over 5 years.
• A progressive increase in the usage of renewable energy, rising to 10% by 2010.
• A reduction in water use by 5% over 5 years.
• A reduction in group wide fleet fuel usage by 5% per year.
• A reduction in CO2 emissions arising from our distribution operations by 5% over a rolling 3 year average.
• A reduction in the quantity of solid waste of 5% based on landfill tax paid, year on year.

Warning: some of these files are large, and may therefore take some time to download.