Sustainability
1 Victoria Street energy use
Sustainable procurement
BIS is committed to reducing its supply chain impacts by procuring sustainably. The Department achieves this through sustainability clauses in tenders and using Government Buying Standards when selecting a product or service.
Food and catering procurement is subject to Government Buying Standards and the BIS catering contractor has processes in place to comply with all Mandatory standards detailed in the guidance and several of the voluntary best practice criteria in food and catering services standards
Of particular note, BIS’ caterers:
- Source 100% RSPCA Freedom Food free range eggs.
- Do not buy any fish that is labelled as ‘red’ by the Marine Conservation Society, have signed the Mayor of London’s Sustainable Fish City Pledge and are currently working with the Marine Stewardship Council on Chain of Custody for their supply chain.
- Supply coffee that is triple certified i.e. Organic, Rain Forest Alliance and Fairtrade.
- Supply Fairtrade traditional tea.
- Minimise food waste by plating meals, batch cooking, production and wastage control.
Government cross-departmental energy-saving competition
On 14 May David Cameron announced that government departments would cut their emissions by 10 per cent within 12 months, and pledged to make this the greenest government ever. During October BIS was involved in a government cross-departmental energy-saving competition to see who could save the most energy over the previous month.
BIS put a number of measures in place to save more energy:
- Expediting site rationalisation process to concentrate accommodation in more energy-efficient buildings.
- Installed voltage reduction equipment.
- Aligned operating temperatures with best practice for the public sector and adjusted set points on heating and cooling.
- Implementing an “optimal core hours window” for heating and cooling.
- Revising server room cooling temperatures.
- Eliminating unnecessary or redundant internal and external lighting.
- Installed timers on lifts and shut off six lifts at the weekend and evenings.
- Turning computers and monitors off properly during prolonged absences.
- Carrying out regular “walk-round” surveys to identify and weed out energy inefficient behaviour and promote good practise.
- An internal communications campaign run jointly by Estates and Internal Communications teams, which ran poster campaigns, intranet stories, off and online suggestion boxes and foyer displays.
Green Guardians
BIS has set up an informal network of 'Green Guardians' to raise awareness of sustainability issues and share ideas about how to make BIS a greener place to work. The Green Guardian network is designed to be a driver for change, and will play a big role in helping BIS meet its emission targets:
The number of Green Guardians has doubled to 49 during the competition period, following activities including a green ideas-generating workshop, intranet articles and a recruiting message from our Sustainable Development Champion (who was acting Permanent Secretary at the time)
Our Sustainable Development team arranged a workshop with Green Guardians and the Facilities and Service Management teams to explore energy saving ideas under the headings of “Change behaviour”, “Communications”, “Estates”, and “ICT/ Travel”.
The Sustainable Development team is now looking into the ideas generated to ascertain their feasibility. Ideas include:
Communications
Developing a sustainable development intranet site and discussion forum, as well as creating speaking platforms for the Green Guardians, with established networks within BIS (so our Building User Group to spread energy saving messages).
Change behaviour
Establish a 'Green etiquette' where energy saving behaviour is the norm, so ‘Think before you print’ - use of pin numbers, double-sided printing, recycling, and publishing figures on how much waste vs recycling each group and floor in BIS produces to stimulate competition.
ICT/Travel
Facilitating and stepping up use of video and tele-conferencing.
Estates
Changing the settings of motion sensor lighting to reduce period lights that are on at night.
BIS believes that a top down and bottom up approach to energy saving - led by our leadership and Facilities and Service Management teams with grass roots activism from our Green Guardians and support from all staff will drive us towards meeting our energy saving target.
