In 2010 The Castle signed up to the Mayor of London's Green Procurement Code in a further bid to commit ourselves to reducing the effects of our activities on the environment.

About the MGPC
"The combined purchasing power of London based companies has huge potential to positively tackle the capital's waste problem, reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the Mayor of London's target of cutting the capital's carbon emissions by 60% by 2025".

The Mayor of London's Green Procurement Code is a support service providing practical advice and online resources to help embed green purchasing into all aspects of an organisation, including sourcing green products.

MGPC Achievements
Since October 2007 members of the Green Procurement Code have spent over £742 million on green products and diverted 191,131 tonnes of waste from landfill. This represents a saving of 78,863 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Our signatories also make a valuable contribution to the green economy - reported purchases from over 680 suppliers have supported more than 1300 jobs.

Why Buy Green?

• To help the environment
• Help combat climate change - even one small office can emit three to five tonnes of carbon dioxide a year
• Conserve natural resources
• Create markets for recycled materials - recycling becomes a redundant exercise if the markets for recycled products do not exist
• Send less rubbish to landfill sites - landfill sites, nationally, are responsible for emitting over 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
• Reduce costs - energy efficient appliances are cheaper to run and water efficient products offer ongoing cost savings on water bills.
• Businesses will find waste costs rising as dependence on landfill increasingly attracts financial penalties and the costs of regulation and waste disposal are passed to waste producers.

Progress Review
We were asked to produce evidence of our green procurement through the completion of an online self-assessment tool. As this task fell to me, I was relatively lucky (and relieved) to have a lot of the information at my fingertips as it had already been collated for the 2009 Environmental Report.
Once this was completed we then just had the audit to get through and a couple of weeks wait to find out how well we'd done in carrying out the 'green' procedures we'd put in place.

Results
I'm pleased to say we were awarded GOLD in recognition for all our hard work in the last few years! And we are hoping to continue to build on this success in 2011 with a number of plans in the pipeline which we'll let you know about in due course.