A Community Media Company

Our aim is to serve local communities by meeting their needs for local news, information and advertising services through a range of media including print and digital channels which together achieve unparalleled levels of market reach.

Carbon Footprint

The Group established its Carbon Footprint Taskforce under the Chairmanship of S R Paterson, our Chief Financial Officer, in 2008. This taskforce developed the Group’s
environmental policy and is responsible for co-ordinating the Group’s activities in this area.

Due to significant pressures across the business in 2009, the Group did not meet as often as planned but the intention is to address this in 2010.

Many of the Carbon Footprint Taskforce initiatives, which are designed to reduce our impact on the environment, are implemented through the Employee Forums that operate at all of our publishing centres. Reducing the environmental impact of our operations has been an initiative that has been embraced by the forums and has resulted in many local projects. We are pleased with how they have continued to promote these activities despite the difficult trading environment.

The aims of the Carbon Footprint Taskforce are as follows:

• Establish Group Policy and objectives
• Promote the general aims of “reduce, reuse, recycle”
• Work through the established Employee Forums
• Co-ordinate Group-wide initiatives
• Agree, under the auspices of the Newspaper Society, a standard method of measuring
  the Carbon Footprint (Scope 2) and seek to reduce this (base year 2006) by 25% over the next 5 years
• Run an annual Group Environmental Award

The Group continues to work in partnership with Dell, its principal supplier of IT equipment, to develop a disposal channel for redundant IT equipment. During 2009, we continued our programme of gathering end of life items from divisional centres and sending them to Dell regional collection points, minimising the environmental and transportation impact. Once collected and audited, Dell works with developing countries to provide the re-purposed computer systems to schools and emerging industry, where there is a shortage of such hardware. Anything which cannot be used in this way is broken down into its constituent parts and reused in industry to avoid disposal into landfill, ensuring total compliance with all WEEE Regulations and waste legislation.