Download - Prudential Corporate Responsibility report 2011

28 The environment
Measuring
impact
A pioneering project in 2011
helped Prudential in Asia
begin a new phase in dealing
with its environmental effect
‘The Asian trial was a
vital and successful
first step in managing
Prudential Corporation
Asia’s environmental
responsibilities.’
Prudential is
committed to improving
its environmental
performance all around
the world. In every
country in which we
operate, we aim to manage our
environmental responsibilities as
effectively as possible.
Our efforts in this direction took a
significant step forward in 2011 with
the trial of an environmental monitoring
programme by Prudential Corporation
Asia. The programme was the first step
in measuring the energy and water used
and the waste created by Prudential
Corporation Asia’s operations, with a view
to finding out how those measurements
compare with equivalent businesses
and seeing where there is room
for improvement.
This programme is the latest in a
series of environmental improvements
that began as a UK-focused initiative
six years ago. David Glinski, Group
Environment, Health & Safety Manager,
says the Asia trial was a vital and
successful first step in managing
Prudential’s environmental responsibilities.
Prudential’s Asia operations tend to be
housed in multi-tenanted buildings where
environmental monitoring is not the norm,
making this a particularly significant step.
‘We were asked by the board in 2010
to see if we could collect energy, water
and waste data for all our offices in Asia,’
he says. ‘We focused on properties that
were 20,000 square feet or more, which
equated to 45 sites. Most of those are
leased, which is quite important, because
when we’re leasing buildings in multitenanted
high-rise office blocks there
can be a difficulty in obtaining data and
controlling it. Overall that equated to
2.3 million square feet of real estate,
which is quite a bit.
‘The thrust of the project was to
find out whether we can collate this
information, and we’ve found out that
we can. Our colleagues in Hong Kong
did a great job in collecting that data.
That means we can report this
information going forward, and what
gets measured we can then influence
in terms of setting reduction targets and
measures to reduce our impact on the
environment.’