Reducing Environmental Impact From our Operations
from the Northern Trust 2017 CSR report
Northern Trust’s Corporate Services Group, charged with management of our real estate portfolio, procurement and facilities services, executes Northern Trust’s objective of reducing or eliminating negative environmental impacts from our supply chain. We detail our environmental expectations of vendors by providing them our Supplier Code of Conduct. Vendors’ sustainable practices are factored into our selection process, and we regularly review suppliers’ adherence to the Supplier Code of Conduct and pursue corrective measures when necessary, as noted in our Global Procurement Policy.
Northern Trust recognizes that the long-term viability of our business and that of our clients is tied to the health and well-being of our planet. We therefore commit to protecting and preserving the environment and to eliminating or mitigating any negative environmental impacts from our operations.
We align our business with the fundamental principle of sustainability—meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We do this by integrating environmental considerations into our company-wide decision-making processes, committing to improving continually our business practices and delivering tangible, positive results related to the environment.
We use energy to power our data centers and facilities, the majority of which are located in North America. As a result, the bulk of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stem from our North American operations. We first started tracking our carbon footprint, comprised of the carbon dioxide equivalent of all GHGs produced in our operations, in 2006. Since then, we have improved our data collection processes and calculation methodologies to align with the GHG Protocol.
Working closely with our building managers, Northern Trust follows the best environmentally friendly building strategies and practices outlined by The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Among our offices in North America and APAC, we have received two LEED platinum certifications, seven gold certifications, one silver certification and one general certification. In addition, we use reliable and sophisticated tracking programs to monitor and manage our environmental performance and to calculate our annual carbon footprint.
After the completion of a comprehensive study in 2015, we set a goal to reduce our total Scope 1, Scope 2 (using the market-based approach) and Scope 3 carbon emissions by 3 percent per full-time employee (FTE) by 2020, using our 2015 emissions as a baseline. By the end of 2016, we had already exceeded that goal, reducing our emissions by 9.65 percent. As result, we have set a new goal to reduce our emissions by 25 percent from our 2015 baseline by the end of 2020.
