Environmental management

Twice a year, the O2 Board reviews the performance of our environmental strategy, policy and stated objectives, which are designed to help reduce O2’s main effects on the environment. These are:

• Fuel, energy and water.
• Waste management in our offices, retails stores and networks.
• Minimising impact on local environments.
• Emissions and transport.
• Managing the environmental impact of our supply chain.

Our environmental policy and objectives are aligned with the European Commission’s Environmental Action Programme – “Environment 2010 - Our Future, Our Choice” - to tackle climate change, protect nature and wildlife, preserve natural resources and manage waste, environmental and health issues. It is also in line with the Kyoto Protocol to reduce the effects of global warming.

Our Group-wide certification to ISO 14001 ¹ , the international environmental management standard, commits us to:

• Be independently assessed by a third party to ensure our systems meet national and European standards.
• Demonstrate our commitment to operating in an environmentally responsible way.
• Assure compliance with environmental legislation.
• Improve the management and control of our environmental risks.
• Demonstrate corporate governance of our environmental management.

O2's Group-wide Environment Forum reports at six-monthly intervals to the O2 Board through our environmental champion, Peter Richardson, Chief Executive Officer, O2 Airwave. We publish information outlining our aims and achievements every year in our corporate responsibility report and we keep a register of significant environmental risks in our Group risk register.
 
Individual operating businesses are held responsible for ensuring that the effects of their businesses are properly controlled and managed. Each O2 business has an environmental steering group and a local environment manager. All line managers are expected to ensure compliance with our statutory obligations.

Our environmental managers work closely with several environmental groups, including the international Mobile Phone Partnership Initiative (MPPI), the Fonebak initiative and the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), among others. We are a member of the UK’s Institute of Environmental Management Assessors (IEMA) and the All Party Political Climate Change group (APPCCG).

Environmental projects

As well as our certified environmental management programme we have several environmental projects that aim to win employees’ and customers’ hearts and minds for the environmental cause.

In January 2006 we held an employee workshop in the UK to identify ways of making the Company an even better place to work. Participants contributed new ideas that will help to improve our environmental performance.  In 2006 we intend to implement some of the ideas that were raised on the recycling of office waste and in employee environmental campaigns.

We also ran several other environmental projects that support local community initiatives. For example:

• O2 UK’s handset recycling scheme helps to finance projects for youth at risk through the charity Weston Spirit.
• O2 Airwave was involved in a school biodiversity project.
• In Germany we are linked with the WWF - World Wide Fund for Nature® to help reclaim the meadows of the River Elbe through volunteering.
• In Ireland we support the Tree Council of Ireland's planting 15,000 trees every year.

¹ Excluding O2 Ireland retail operations