Nexus Green

Nexus work with our Council partners to deliver a shared environmental agenda with the promotion of sustainability as a core element. Our operating policies and procedures are based on ISO 14001 and EMAS and as such we have a:

• Clear and published environmental policy communicating our priorities and focus
• Significant Impacts Register identifying legal requirements and impact on environment
• Environmental Impact Reduction Plan based on the significant impacts register
• Procurement Policy
• Waste Management Policy

As a large organisation we purchase significant amounts of goods and services. This is coupled with the large number of new build projects and refurbishments that we undertake on an annual basis. Our social enterprise philosophy is reflected in our procurement policies. We require that the companies we procure from have environmental maintainability policies. We positively seek social organisations and fair trade companies during procurement. We also require organisations tendering for our services to outline their sustainability credentials. Our procurement scoring matrix also puts a higher weighting score allocation for those socially and sustainable elements within bid documents.

We are actively working towards lower consumption rates at our leisure centres through the good house keeping measures identified in our Environmental and Energy Efficiency Policy and Action Plans. We purchase Gas, Electricity and Water through an external monitoring and purchasing service, under an Energy Management Agreement.

Waste management forms a core element of our Strategy and:

• We work with suppliers who adopt “minimum packaging “guidelines and towards reducing the transport needs of stock supply.
• We seek to reduce all types of waste – helping to ease consumption and lower costs of waste disposal
• We seek to re-use resources wherever possible
• We seek to re-cycle items wherever possible and in conjunction with the re-cycling programming offered by the Council’s waste management contractors

We are aware that for our Energy and Environmental Strategy to work, we need to ensure ‘buy in’ at all levels of the organisation.

All employees are fully inducted and trained in our Environment and Energy policy. Each facility has an Energy Champion who is given specialist training and a handbook which outlines their role. One of the main functions of an Energy Champion is to promote energy efficiency and environmental awareness within the staff team.

We have also developed a workforce eco-culture that embraces environmental and efficiency improvements with staff involvements encouraged and enforced at every level. We raise the profile of environmental issues through regular communication with staff through the weekly company newsletter, fact sheets (good house-keeping guide), website, notice boards and management and staff meetings.

Our Services Director, Robert Jamieson, is responsible for driving our green agenda.