The Environment
The Environment
"Our commitment is to understand and to continually improve the performance and management of our environmental impact."
Full unaudited details of our Corporate Responsibility activities are available online — www.halfordscompany.com/cr
The Environment
Our products, stores, offices, and fleet of delivery vehicles have direct impacts on the environment. We also understand that there are indirect impacts caused by the production and use of our products. Our commitment is to understand and to continually improve the performance and management of our environmental impact throughout the Halfords supply chain.
In managing our environmental responsibilities, our overall objectives relate to the following key areas:
Fuel Efficiency
During FY12 our fleet of lorries drove over 7,000,000 kilometres in delivering product to our stores. To more fully understand our impact on Greenhouse Gas ("GHG") emissions, we have converted the transport fleet fuel usage to total CO2 emissions. In FY12, The CO2 equivalent usage, calculated based on DEFRA's 2011 Freight Transport conversion factor of 2.648, indicates that we have used over 6 million tonnes of CO2, an 18% reduction year-on-year. This has been achieved by better utilisation of our Main and Cycling Distribution Centre, resulting in improved management of store deliveries and in the use of larger and double-decker trailer units, meaning more stock can be carried per delivery.
Natural Resources
Water Consumption per Retail store (litres)
We continue to reduce our water usage and over the years have invested in "smart" water meters, which helps us to identify water leaks at an early stage. In our Retail stores, in FY12 we maintained our proud record of reducing water usage year-on-year with a further 12.4% reduction.
Volumes of waste material recycled versus that sent to landfill have increased over the last five years to 81% in 2012.
As motor vehicle servicing centres, our autocentres are continually disposing of "motor vehicle" related waste safely. In FY12 as well as recycling car batteries we disposed of c.197,200 tyres (2011: 132,000) and c.876,300 litres of oil (2011: 755,000).
Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions
As we have continued to open new stores and autocentres our overall use of gas and electricity has improved as we added energy management systems to our properties and implemented specific action plans around voltage reduction. This year's use of energy has not been affected by the cold weather periods of December 2010 and February 2011 and we have reduced our use of energy within the Group's stores and autocentres, in 2012, by 10.6%. In Retail where records have been kept since 2007 we continue to reduce our use of gas and electricity in line with our target of between 15% and 20% on a 2007 base.
The following graph represents the energy used by our stores, autocentres, head offices and distribution centres.
Total Energy Usage (kWh)
Energy Usage per Store and Autocentre (kWh)
