Environmental sustainability
Effective environmental management is critical to our overall business success. We’re setting challenging targets for continuing improvement of our environmental performance.
Sovereign is committed to delivering current and future residents with sustainable homes supported by responsible business practices. For us, this means operating with integrity; controlling and minimising potentially negative impacts and maximising our positive impact wherever possible.
We’ve set strategic environmental objectives that apply across all parts of Sovereign including our operational footprint and the management and development of our residents’ homes. These objectives, with associated targets, help us to continually improve. The delivery of these objectives is supported by our formal environmental management system.
Our objectives are to:
- Improve the energy efficiency of our homes and be efficient in our own carbon emissions from the use of energy and fuel
- Improve the climate resilience of our homes and our operations
- Reduce, reuse and recycle waste produced across the organisation
- Maintain an externally certified Management system that meets the requirements of ISO14001:2015
- Use water efficiently within the organisation and support our residents to do the same
- Strive to procure sustainable products, materials and contractor services
- Remain committed to the prevention of pollution and promotion of biodiversity
- Ensure compliance with legal and other requirements and sign up to other relevant environmental standards for continual improvement
- Engage our stakeholders and form partnerships to promote positive environmental practice
- Continue to reflect on what we, as a progressive organisation, can contribute to the sustainability challenge
Better homes, lower resident bills, lower emissions and better lifestyles
Our homes, offices and vehicles emit approximately 100,000 tonnes of carbon emissions through energy and fuel use.
Our homes make up 90% of this footprint, this is where we have some control over the type and efficiency of boilers, the amount of insulation, and the specification of windows. By investing in improvements to these items we also help to reduce our resident’s energy bills and hopefully encourage a warm and healthy home in the winter.
Our focus is to develop excellent, energy efficient homes to help meet the demand, to improve our worst performing homes and to deliver our replacement programmes.
Using renewable technology
We have over 600 homes operating with renewables technologies, most of which are solar PV panels and air source heat pumps, and this number grows every year. Modern air source heat pumps can be an effective heating solution for homes, especially those which are not connected to the gas grid. We continue to replace some electric and solid fuel systems with these heat pumps.
We are open-minded about installing renewables and do so where it makes long term financial, environmental and social sense. Technologies will emerge and evolve and we look forward to continuing to install these systems to help us reduce our emissions and to help our residents have warmer, cheaper to run homes.
Climate change resilience
We recognise climate change and extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves as a potential risk to our homes, our residents and our operations. We, along with some our residents, have seen the impacts of flooding first hand. The disruption and financial impact for all involved is considerable.
We have started a review to better understand our climate change risk and to learn the lessons from our flood response efforts in the past.