Our Environment
When considering the scale of global environmental issues, such as climate change, you may think that Informa has a relatively small impact. But with around 8,000 employees working in more than 40 countries, producing 40,000 printed publications and holding more than 10,000 events annually, it all starts to add up…
Over the past few years, we’ve started to capture the scale of our impacts, firstly to understand them, but ultimately to find ways to reduce them as much as possible. This has been a challenge and we still have a long way to go, but there is no doubt that sound environmental management has also delivered tangible financial benefits, which will only become more attractive over time.
Our Impacts
The key environmental impacts of our business are our supply chain; and business travel, including the indirect impact of delegates travelling to our events and conferences.
We are an office-based business, so our direct energy consumption is not on the same scale as other industries. Nevertheless, we still feel it important to measure this impact and set ourselves annual targets to reduce it.
What we are doing…
Managing our Print Supply Chain
Taylor and Francis (T&F) and IBI, our major publishing arms, take a proactive approach to managing their print suppliers. T&F developed an Environmental Questionnaire in 2008 to be able to rank suppliers on environmental performance and engage with them to drive improvements. This was piloted in the UK in 2009 and has now been rolled out to all of T&F’s and IBI’s printers globally.
Responsible Sourcing of Paper
Informa is committed to sourcing paper from sustainable sources, and for us that means paper that has been certified as by an internationally recognised forest certification scjeme.
In the UK Taylor and Francis have their own FSC Chain of Custody, which means that we can put our own FSC label on our publications. For several years T&F has printed the majority of its books and journals on FSC certified paper.
In 2011 we put Informa’s paper sourcing policy. This applies to both our events and publishing businesses worldwide. This policy states that we will only source paper that is certified by the two recognised global sustainable forest certification schemes – FSC and PEFC.
Print on Demand & Print Local
Over the last 5-10 years years, Print-on-Demand (POD) has been gathering momentum in the book industry thanks to rapid improvements in technology and quality.
T&F has capitalised on this by introducing a system called Distributed Print on Demand (DPOD), which builds on the company’s long-term policy of ‘local printing’. 42,700 of T&F’s 55,000 titles are now available in POD format globally and 90% of new titles are set-up in POD when they first go into print to ensure they are ready to move directly into POD format after an initial print-run.
POD is less relevant for the journals publishing businesses as they tend to have large print runs. Instead both IBI and T&F Journals have moved towards a model of local printing. Journals can now be printed and distributed on close to their market in print hubs located in UK, US, Singapore, and Australia.
Business Travel
We are starting to measure business travel globally as well as investing in, and promoting the use of, video conferencing facilities.
Our conferencing, events, and performance improvement consultancy and training businesses are also exploring web technology to remotely manage and deliver certain programme content.
Office energy consumption
All of our major offices (more than 50 people) are asked to report their office energy consumption as part of their bi-annual CR KPIs. Since 2009, Informa has also been running an annual Group-wide Green Week which promotes the implementation of initiatives to reduce office energy consumption. These initiatives vary from office to office but have included the installation of more energy efficient air-conditioning and lighting systems as well as changing to renewable source energy suppliers.