IMPACT

THE LAST YEAR – A SNAPSHOT
2006
Ten years ago, the idea of
the ‘Footprint Committee’ at
Allens was created and rolled
out across our offices. The
committees were made up
of passionate and motivated
partners and staff, and they
established and inspired the
firm’s environmental program.
The premise was simple –
help the firm to be more
sustainable. First task to
address was a humble, but
worthy, goal: helping the
firm to cut our paper usage
and implement compulsory
double-sided printing.
2015
Our Australian offices are now
certified carbon neutral under
the Australian Government’s
Carbon Neutral Program. We are
the first Australian law firm to
achieve such a milestone.
This was achieved largely by the
work of our committees – and
the support of the firm – who
have continued to drive real and
significant improvements in the
firm’s environmental performance
over the years.
In 2015, our program is still a very
strong grassroots program, but
our commitment has continued to
grow and mature. This year, we also
appointed a Community Engagement
Manager with responsibility for the
firm’s environmental program and our
carbon neutral commitment and we
achieved certification for our AusLSA
environmental management system –
or AEMS – based on ISO 14001.
Cutting our emissions still remains
our number one priority. This year,
we have reduced our emissions by
13.5 per cent.
Collecting our CitySwitch award
Other achievements:
Reduced energy use by 7.6 per cent
Achieved 100 per cent virtualisation of
all production servers and successfully
centralised the majority of IT systems
into our core data centre
Used 100 per cent recycled, FSC
certified A4 copy paper
Named National New Signatory of the
Year by CitySwitch
Participated in Earth Hour, Ride to Work
Day, National Recycling Week and
celebrated World Environment Day
COLLABORATING WITH OTHERS
When offsetting our residual emissions, Allens set the rule that we would only
buy high quality, accredited offsets and we would seek to buy offsets from
projects that aligned with the firm’s community engagement program and
objectives. We have achieved this by entering into a carbon offsetting partnership
with Qantas, called the Qantas Future Planet Program.
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IMPACT