Responsibility for our environment

RBC BlueBay is committed to taking a responsible approach to protecting the environment and works to minimise the impact of our operations and deliver continuous improvement in our performance.

As a minimum, we ensure that we comply with environmental regulation.

As an investment company, our direct environmental impact is mainly associated with the buildings we occupy. The majority of our employees and partners are located in London, UK, with others in the USA, Luxembourg, Japan, Switzerland and Germany. In all instances, we are one of many tenants; this point is important because in practical terms it limits the degree to which we are able to address some of our environmental impact, which is ultimately determined by our building owner.

Energy management and climate change

While our direct building operations may have limited climate change impact, we are committed to addressing energy and climate change in a number of ways:

• The majority of our IT equipment, such as PCs, are placed on stand-by in the evenings and over the weekends.
• We only use couriers for distributing material in instances where this is deemed 'business critical', otherwise we promote alternative options such as use of traditional postal services or scanning and emailing documents where possible
• Many of our staff in London travel to work by public transport (rail or bus). We encourage employees to cycle to work by providing secure cycle racks, showers and changing facilities, as well as operating a cycle scheme that enables employees to make savings in relation to bike purchases for work commuting.
• Staff are also encouraged to take public transport for work-related travel where possible.

Resource use and waste management

We are working to improve resource efficiency and reduce waste, including

• Reducing paper consumption by having default setting for all printers to be double-sided (and using FollowMe printing in our London offices which requires staff to activate the printing otherwise it is deleted after a set time period), enabling document scanning and encouraging employees to only print documents where necessary
• Disposing of e-waste in a responsible way and in compliance with EU WEEE regulations
• Promoting waste recycling by providing bins for segregating different types of waste, such as metals, paper & cardboard and glass
• Exploring replacing the use of paper towels in bathroom facilities with hand dryers, and improving water efficiency by introducing sensor taps

As we are not the sole tenants in the buildings we rent, in some instances environmental data collection is challenging, in terms of being able to disaggregate and attribute what is actual RBC BlueBay usage. However, we have started to collect consumption data for our two London offices on energy, water, paper and waste and hope to be able to provide performance data in the future.

Our main building in London (77 Grosvenor Street) has attained a ‘good’ rating in terms of the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) Regulations 2014 in the UK. These assessments are audits of the energy used by their buildings, industrial processes and transport to identify cost-effective energy saving measures.