cutting emissions linked to business trips

Our employees’ business trips (train and plane) account for around 3% of our greenhouse gas emissions, in addition to emissions linked to daily journeys to and from work. For several years now, we have been promoting more environmentally-friendly means of transport, putting in place systems designed to prevent use of cars by individual employees. In the UK and France, several sites have launched initiatives since 1997. The travel plan for the Bristol site and the Lyons site in France have been included in the best mobility management practices in line with the European Mobility Management Day project organized by the European Commission.

In France, a dozen business travel plans are in place, making it possible to promote the use of public transport, car sharing or cycling. In Switzerland, an initiative is also encouraging the use of car sharing. Several actions were organized during the 2006 European Sustainable Mobility Week to build awareness of sustainable mobility issues.

 

Several remote tools and systems are making it possible to reduce the number of business trips that our employees need to make such as conference calls, videoconferencing, and remote document sharing. These tools are becoming increasingly popular within the Group, helping limit our greenhouse gas emissions, reduce our transport costs and improve our individual and collective productivity.

The Coop’Net tool, enables teams in different locations to share working documents. This tool is often combined with a conference call. We estimate Coop’Net conferences have prevented some 1.2 million individual trips in 2006. In 2006, it exceeded the one million conference mark since it was launched in 1999.

Real-size videoconferencing (RealMeet) is another very popular tool. In 2006, 1,000 medium or long-haul flights were avoided thanks to this tool, representing more than 2,000 tons of CO2 savings.