Our impacts

As an office based organisation, our principle environmental impacts are related to the electricity consumed in our offices, the flights we take to conduct business around the world, and the waste we produce in our offices. Few of our activities directly produce the environmental impacts associated with energy use, travel, and waste: the majority of our impacts are related to the greenhouse gas emissions created through these activities by other parties, so called ‘scope 2 and 3’ emissions. As a result, our principal focus has been on reducing our direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions – the so-called carbon footprint.

Our 2010 carbon footprint, certified by Achilles under the CEMARS programme to ISO 14064 standards, stood at 35,815 tonnes and the trend is heading in the right direction. We have made good progress in reducing our emissions from energy, including electricity and heating. Transport remains our biggest challenge.

Reducing our impacts

Aon’s senior manager for sustainability works across the business to implement projects that reduce our environmental impact. With a specific focus on reducing energy and carbon, Aon also has an energy manager to help with best practice and energy efficiency projects. Many of these projects involve the building infrastructure and the changes are invisible, but they are saving energy. Some of our achievements to date have included:

• An automatic shutdown systems for PCs left on after close of business
• Installation of 'smart' automatic metre readers (AMR) to help us better manager our energy use
• Dry-cycling reduction devices fitter on our gas boilers to reduce necessary consumption
• A fleet of energy efficient Canon multifunction devices to replace a much larger number of individual printing, scanning and copying devices.  Double-sided printint has been set as default
• Using recycled paper as our preferred standard

We are always looking at new projects and are currently replacing our halogen bulbs with LED lighting in some offices and fitting timers to our vending devices.

Last updated 1 June 2012

Aon UK Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in respect of insurance mediation activities only. FP6868