Our Group-wide Environmental Protection policy commits us to protecting the environment in a sustainable way, through a systematic process of continual improvement in minimising pollution and controlling our direct and indirect impacts.
Richard Poston, Director of Corporate Affairs, Telefónica Europe plc, acts as Group champion on the environment and has ultimate responsibility for ensuring that our Environmental Management System is developed and refined in line with business needs to meet all our legal and regulatory commitments on the environment. Each of our operating businesses has also appointed individual champions to make sure our policies and practices are being implemented in a consistent way.
We are using the ISO14001 environmental management standard to help us control our impact on the environment. O2 Group received accreditation under this standard in 2005. We also assess our suppliers using the same environmental standard to make sure we are doing all that we can to control the indirect impact we have on the environment.
We have developed an Environmental Procurement Policy – which sits alongside our Ethical Procurement Policy – so that we can work with our suppliers to ensure they meet the 14001 standards. These two policies allow our suppliers to monitor their own performance through self-assessment questionnaires we have developed. They also incorporate a risk-based approach which allows us to manage any social, environmental and ethical risk we may face.
