Sustainability Initiatives: CERES Endorsement
CERES is a coalition of leading U.S. environmental, investor, and advocacy groups working together for a sustainable future. The CERES Principles are a ten-point code of environmental conduct that encourages companies to commit to continual improvement in their environmental performance. The CERES Principles, endorsed by more than 70 companies, represent a voluntary commitment to continual environmental improvement that extends beyond the actions required by government regulations.
Our interest in involvement with CERES began in the spring of 2001. Several client projects resulted in research into topics of environmental best practices and performance reporting, which led to examinations of both the Global Reporting Initiative and CERES. First Environment recognized that the CERES principles are consistent with the firm’s values and the commitments contained in our existing corporate environmental policy. After contacting CERES and scheduling a meeting to discuss our interest, the Board of Directors of CERES accepted our endorsement of the CERES Principles in October 2001.
CERES Sustainability Reporting
First Environment released its first CERES sustainability report for the year 2002. “Our endorsement of the CERES Principles signifies that the firm is committed to learning by doing and leading by example”, said Tod Delaney, First Environment’s president. “The firm is proud to share its report with interested stakeholders and other service organizations that hope to take a similarly proactive position towards environmental management issues.”
As an office-based service organization, our report addresses small business issues and the environmental impacts associated with a typical service organization. The report highlights our integrated management system, which is used to address environmental, social and other sustainability issues. The report also describes our Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is an internal effort to identify, measure and establish a baseline of greenhouse gas emissions associated with company activities. The report contains summaries of our greenhouse gas emissions inventory information for energy use, business travel and office supply consumption.
Our second report charts another milestone in the firms’ commitment to the CERES principles. For the 2003 analysis of environmental impacts, we extended our program in order to address the natural resources consumed by each operation. In order to better conceptualize our operations’ environmental performance, the report takes an Activity-Impact approach to the evaluation. We describe the net environmental impact of our primary activities, in terms of natural resources used and emissions of carbon dioxide.
        |
