Our energy use
How the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency uses energy in all our buildings and our work to reduce waste.
We support the UK strategy for sustainable development in all of our working practices. We have the same targets for recycling, use of lower energy lighting, etc as the rest of the Department of Health.
What we’re doing to reduce our energy use
We’ve already changed some of our working practices (such as the move to electronic working via our database Sentinel) to reduce volumes of paperwork required and, as a consequence, transport emissions. We will:
- ensure that sustainable policies are built into our procurement processes
- seek to reduce our energy and other natural resource consumption
- seek to reduce carbon emissions from travel where possible
- recycle as much of our waste as possible
- encourage best practice amongst our staff by producing a ‘good practice’ guide
- consider what we can do to support the communities we work in
- continue to consider what more we can do as an organisation and set targets for future years
Our building and facilities
There are difficulties in meeting our objective of using ‘green’ electricity due to the main agency building being leased from a private landlord. Our proposed relocation will offer us greater opportunities to develop sustainable practices.
We now collect data on actual car mileage, which has enabled us to set baseline measurements. We aim to ensure that visits are planned in such a way as to be environmentally friendly.
Monitoring and checking progress
We have a working group to collect data, set baseline measurements and consider achievable targets. These appear in our annual reports. The agency also contributes to the Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE) report.