General information: our goals of operations

GNM is intended to be a leader in sustainability in the media sector. Photograph: Rex Features

The Guardian has spent several years working to reduce the environmental impacts of their operations. As part of this work, Guardian & media developed a long-term ambition to be carbon positive. This fits in with our overall vision to be a leader in sustainability within the media industry.

In terms of our operations, carbon positive means to achieve best practices to reduce the direct and indirect environmental impacts and support social justice within the limits that we can control or influence. This includes the proper and efficient use of all resources and minimize emissions, as well as support social justice through an engagement with local communities and supply chains.

Of course, the carbon is only one of the problems we face in our operations. Therefore we also focused on other key impacts such as the consumption of resources, including water and paper, as well as creation of waste across the enterprise.

MGN plans transform into a company's first digital, which means that our impact of our production traditional newspaper will decrease over time as that will grow our digital environmental impact. For this reason, we are committed to supporting the creation of the research in this area through a number of collaborations that aim to make a real contribution to knowledge in this field.

For example, the guardian has teamed up with project Sympact, a joint research project between the universities of Surrey and Bristol to understand the environmental impacts of digital media and develop ways to reduce them.

We also have a full time research engineer embedded in the guardian for two years, which is studying the implications of sustainability of how to design digital products. This section of operations of the life of 2011 our values report provides an overview of the achievements and challenges, as well as plans for the future.

Measurement and quality data collection is vital in this area of the business if we are going to continue to improve our performance, and that is why we have a section dedicated to this. Operational activities that we cover are:

Operations of the Office

Digital operations

Printing operations

Purchases of paper

Acquisitions

Performance

The financial year ending March 2011 was successful in managing and reducing our environmental impact of the negative elements. Reduce emissions of carbon in a 27 per cent had saved 14% in water consumption, improved our recycling rate to 66% and achieved progress in our sustainable supply.

These improvements are predominantly for investment and improved management and optimisation of processes across the enterprise. Our performance has been recognized by the standard of confidence of carbon and go beyond our commitment 10: 10.

As all ambitious projects, there are also areas where we have struggled. The collection and recycling of waste in our main office, for example, has been hampered by the lack of joint reflection and the rather prosaic problem of having an election wrong Dumper. This is addressed through is love your waste project.

Also, while he moved to place of Kings, a building with high environmental standards, two years ago, there was a gap between the development of the construction and the way that works in a sustainable way in everyday life. This is a common problem caused by developers seeing their responsibilities to stop once you are given the keys. For example, has taken two years to install smart meters. However, the team focused and it came to pass in the optimization of construction systems to our patterns of use and contributed to saving energy of 17% last year.

While there is an increasing emphasis on GNM in becoming a "digital first" company, our newspapers continue to play an important role and we have made progress marked to limit the environmental impacts of our purchase of stationery and printing sites.

Print sustainability Center is all about efficiency and our Manchester and Stratford plants have seen reductions in energy, natural resources and hazardous materials through a systematic approach for monitoring, planning, testing and implementation.

In the past year, 96% of newspapers and 82 per cent of grade magazine paper used for the guardian and the observer was recycled or certified virgin fiber used.

As the documents to go from being mostly around breaking news for coverage issues further, paging will continue to reduce even further.

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