Our Carbon footprint

We have measured our carbon footprint – at least in part – since 2002. Between 2002 and 2004 we reported data from our major centres of employment – the UK and France, and in 2005 and 2006 we were able to add in provisional figures from the US operations. Taken together we have environmental data from sites representing 85% of our worldwide workforce.

In calculating the total we include building energy use and emissions from our road usage and air travel. We do not at this stage have good data on emissions from employee travel by other modes.

On that basis, Experian’s carbon footprint is 62,000 tonnes.

52,000 tonnes of this is measured, as described, through our UK, US and French operations and the rest is based on scaling up this measured total to allow for other operations and for other employee transport.

The different contributions to this total are as shown in the pie chart. Emissions from building energy use are the biggest part at roughly 66%, with transport-related emissions making up the rest.

Experian is a growing business and – all other things being equal – we might expect our carbon footprint to grow as we do. Growth brings new people, the need for new buildings and more travel. To allow for this we also look at our normalised carbon emissions – we divide the total by a measure of our size (using $1000 of turnover as the base unit). If the total carbon footprint grows, but the CO2 per $1000 stays the same, we know that all the increase has been due to our growth. If the CO2 per $1000 rises or falls we know that we are becoming less or more carbon-efficient respectively.

The two graphs show an analysis of our measured CO2 emissions (i.e. the 52,000 tonnes generated from our US, UK and French businesses). They show that absolute CO2 emissions in these countries fell by 10% between 2006 and 2007 (excluding air transport data, for which 2007 is our first year’s data), with the principal contributing factor being the UK’s switch to renewable energy and electricity from combined heat and power (CHP) plants. When compared with the growth in the business, this reduction becomes even more dramatic, as normalised emissions have fallen from 14.8 to 11.7 kg/$1000.

Building energy use:

In the year 2006/7 our buildings in the UK, France and the US used 99 million kWh of which 89% was electricity and the rest gas or fuel oil. This is almost identical to the 2006 figure (100 million kWh). When compared to the business’ growth in the same period, using a normalised figure we see that our energy efficiency has increased markedly (from 32.6 to 28.5 kWh/$1000 turnover) reflecting improvements in facilities.

Building energy use is the responsibility of our global facilities management team. There are a number of means by which we can control or reduce it:

1. By engaging our people, raising their awareness of how they can reduce consumption and motivating them to take action. Examples include turning off electrical equipment and lights or using heating and cooling systems properly and in the US there are good examples of overnight building temperatures being reduced and a very noticeable way of engaging people in the UK was champions putting stickers on computers, asking if they could be turned completely off overnight.
   
   
2. By ensuring that new premises and facilities are designed to the highest possible standards of efficiency so that our overall standard rises.
   
   
3. By making changes to the buildings we are in, through new systems or technology. In the US we have installed variable frequency drives on rooftop air-conditioning units and used photocells and movement detectors to control our lighting in Schaumberg.

The building energy use in 2005/6 was equivalent to emitting 35,000 tonnes of CO2. This total fell between 2006 and 2007 as all our buildings in Nottingham in the UK (housing more than 2,000 staff – 15% of our global total) replaced their conventional fossil-fuel generated electricity with CHP and renewable power. This switch alone has saved 5,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Other savings were through contributions by colleagues in the US and France and included changing the power of light bulbs, installing energy saving bulbs, temperature reductions and cooling savings, improved efficiency chillers and 10% energy savings from installing variable frequency drives on roof top air conditioning units. To continue the trend our Facilities team in the US have begun the transition to renewable energy and will reduce their CO2 emissions in 2007-2008.

Employee travel:

Our employees travel regularly on business, by road, rail and aeroplane. We have collected data on the carbon emissions from road and air travel in our US, UK and French businesses and the total figure is approximately 18,000 tonnes (one third from road travel and the rest from flights).

We do not include emissions from home-to-work employee travel in our report, but we do have a number of initiatives in place to help our people travel in greener ways:

In the US we have introduced improvements to our ‘rideshare’ programme including provision of eight sponsored van pools, improved information for all Rideshare users on alternative transport and coordination of information by zip code matching. We’ve also increased compressed working hours and promoted telecommuting.

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