At Summerhouse, we believe in setting high standards of responsibility and integrity towards our employees, communities and the environment.

We are committed to following environmental best practice in every aspect of our business and in the provision of products and services to our clients. We take into full account our environmental impacts and continuously seek to improve our performance.

More specifically, we endeavour to minimise the impact of our operations on the environment by:

Energy
•	Reducing the use of electricity, for example by ensuring unused equipment is turned off when not being used and identifying practices that reduce power consumption.
•	Maximising use of natural light in our offices.
•	Establishing a carbon footprint monitoring system and aiming to reduce our carbon emissions year on year.

Procurement
•	Ensuring all purchased office stationery is environmentally friendly.
•	Choosing energy-saving IT equipment (when replacing or purchasing new equipment) that has been manufactured in an environmentally sound way.

Waste disposal
•	Minimising our use of paper and other office consumables.
•	Recycling all ink jet cartridges, paper, plastic, cardboard, phones etc.
•	Minimising unnecessary printing.
•	Disposing of old hardware responsibly - ideally being reused/reconditioned or if not, being recycled.
•	Reviewing our recycling schemes on an ongoing basis to ensure waste reduction in all the key business materials we use.

Travel
•	Monitoring our travel use.
•	Not using air transport for business purposes where possible.

Culture
•	Communicating internally and externally our environmental policy and performance on a regular basis, and encouraging feedback from staff.
•	Integrating environmental objectives into our advice to all our customers.
•	Ensuring that any associates that we employ take account of environmental issues in their advice to clients.

Legislation
•	Ensuring that we meet all our legal responsibilities.

This statement represents Summerhouse’s general position on environmental issues, and the policies and practices we will apply in conducting our business internally and with our clients.

The Environmental Policy is reviewed annually to ensure its continuing effectiveness.