Environment

Taking action

We're taking action on climate change by:

• improving the energy efficiency of our operations
• buying renewable energy
• offsetting the remaining unavoidable emissions.

Here are Sky's emissions for 2006/2007:

Total CO₂ emissions: 45,555 tonnes.

In 2006 we set our target to reduce CO₂ emissions to 51,032 tonnes by 2010 which, as our 2006/2007 total CO₂ emissions show, we are on track to meeting. This will be a 10% reduction from our 2003 baseline.

Being carbon neutral

In May 2006 we became the world's first CarbonNeutral® media company. This announcement was our first public step in our long-term commitment to tackle climate change.

For more information about Sky's CarbonNeutral® status, check out the CarbonNeutral® Sky document.

Improving building efficiency

Emissions from our sites account for 24,896 tonnes of CO₂ - that's 55% of our total CO₂ emissions.

In 2006/2007 we continued to make changes to our buildings to improve their energy performance by:

• improving lighting - adding presence detection control and more energy efficient lighting in three buildings
• upgrading our air conditioning equipment, including oil-free chillers or inverter drives in four buildings
• improving hardware management in our data centres, using more energy efficient servers and systems that store up to ten times as much data for the same power
• installing hot and cold aisles in our new Amsterdam data centre. This directs cold air only to where it's needed, making the air conditioning as efficient as possible
• putting timers on some out-of-hours equipment, and installing permanent signs throughout buildings to encourage people to turn off PCs, TVs and lights as part of our Switch Off! campaign.

Last year we secured 100% renewable electricity for the supply of our main sites in England, Scotland and most Easynet UK sites.

Travel emissions

Our other main source of CO₂ emissions is travel. In 2006/2007 we generated 20,659 tonnes of CO₂ - 45% of total CO₂ emissions.

Last year, our emissions from travel increased as our growing customer base meant more engineer vans were in use. We have a number of initiatives aimed at reducing emissions from travel, including video and teleconferencing facilities, and locally based taxi services that use hybrid vehicles.

In October 2007 we introduced the UK's first commercial trial of Vauxhall Vivaro B30 bio-diesel vans - these should reduce each van's CO₂ emissions by up to 20%. We've also switched 140 of our field engineer team managers to hybrid vehicles and we're trialling an electric van that will run on renewable electricity.

Indirect emissions

We understand that the carbon we're responsible for extends beyond the emissions we generate and therefore the emissions we include in our footprint. For example, emissions come from our third party suppliers who do set top box installations and outside broadcast companies on behalf of Sky.

We've started to identify the key areas of these indirect emissions and will continue to work with our suppliers and partners to identify, report and reduce these.

This year we examined emissions from outside broadcast activities and outdoor advertising. Annually, these account for approximately 971 tonnes and 2,323 tonnes of CO₂ emissions respectively.