Responsible Citizen

 

Our employee-led Environmental Advisory Group (EAG) focuses on identifying, measuring and reducing the major environmental impacts resulting from our business activities, internally and in the wider community. These major impacts consist of travel, waste and usage of energy, water and raw materials.

Columbia Threadneedle recognises the importance of environmental stewardship and maintains an Environmental Management System (EMS) to ensure measurable and auditable data is accurately maintained for all our major environmental impacts. Some of the key EMS achievements for 2019 are: the successful delivery of waste management and world environment day staff engagement campaigns focussing on plastics and removal of plastic cutlery, continued supply chain and life cycle assessments and a reduction in paper usage through ‘follow me’ printing.

We continued to meet all requirements for the ISO14001:2015 standard throughout 2019 and our total carbon emissions were 18.6% lower than in 2018, a reduction primarily due to reduced air travel.

Columbia Threadneedle carbon emissions 2015 – 2019

Travel data includes all UK employees Energy data is for Cannon Place London.

In 2018, the EAG has set some challenging new EMS objectives and targets, including further reductions in business travel, utility usage and refuse generation, and engagement with our broader supply chain to explore environmental efficiencies.

Keep cup initiative

Paper cups have plastic or wax lining which makes them difficult to recycle. Most UK paper cups will go to ‘energy from waste’ or landfill, instead of being recycled. In 2019, we provided each employee with a Keep Cup, saving the waste of 350,000 paper cups per annum, at an ongoing cost of £15,500.00. By doing so we also reduced our carbon footprint and further strengthened our ISO14001:2015 continuous improvement requirement.

We have been a Living Wage employer since 2015, which means everyone working at Columbia Threadneedle in the UK, regardless of whether they are permanent employees or third-party contractors, receives a minimum hourly wage of £10.75 in London and £9.30 outside London – significantly higher than the national minimum wage of £8.21. Columbia Threadneedle has also met with other occupiers to ensure that the London Living Wage is paid to any contractors engaged by the landlord of our head office building Cannon Place.

The Living Wage is set independently and updated annually, calculated according to the basic cost of living using the Minimum Income Standard for the UK. Decisions about what to include in this standard are set by the public; it is therefore a social consensus about what people need to make ends meet. We continue to work with our suppliers to reduce the environmental and social impacts along our value chain. In 2019 this included working with our stationery, printing, waste management and cleaning contractors and landlords to implement ways of reducing our sustainability impacts. Columbia Threadneedle complies with the Modern Slavery Act (MSA) and publishes an MSA statement on our website as per the requirement for public disclosure.