We operate in a material world. And as you'd expect, in taking care of water - one of life's essentials - we're careful to make plans and build systems that add up. So you can count on us to be fastidious and measured in our use of resources.

Our aim is to engineer for efficiency, design out wastage, and champion in the skills and learning needed to get this right.

As much as our business is rooted in the natural environment, we also depend on extensive, connected, and carefully calibrated systems of engineered infrastructure, plant, and machinery. Thinking in systems is part of our worldview - so it’s only natural for us to engineer for efficiency, to design out wastage, and to find smart ways of making the most of the materials under our stewardship.

Thinking about waste as just a resource in the wrong place opens up a world of opportunity.

By adopting a circular economy approach in all areas of our business, we are able to use less of the world’s finite material resources and reduce the impact of their extraction on nature and biodiversity; generate cost savings; reduce waste; and lower our greenhouse gas emissions.

Our material footprint as a company combines three key activities.

First, like many other businesses, our facilities management, fleet, office and IT needs.

Second, our construction and civil engineering work - digging, building, repairing, shifting large amounts of earth, and deploying construction materials at volume to keep our water and sewage networks running.

And thirdly, we are a waste processor at heart - we take sewage and food waste from homes and businesses, and convert them to biosolids with beneficial nutrients for farmers.

Our overall ambition is to embed and apply circular economy principles across the business:

• Through our design and procurement processes, we will identify opportunities to use less
• What materials we do need, we will source responsibly, minimising environmental footprint
• We will recover resources and energy from waste water
• We will make maximum use of all of our assets, repairing and extending life where possible
• At end of life, where others see waste, we see opportunity, to recover, regenerate and create value
  

We realised 50 years ago that sewage sludge was in fact a valuable product that we could use to generate renewable energy.

Today we are the UK leader in the production of biogas from sludge through anaerobic digestion. In addition, our UK award-winning food waste and green waste recycling business Severn Trent Green Power processes a quarter of the UK’s food waste using AD and composting, and together our bioresources and food waste plants make us the biggest AD operator in the UK.

We exported 245 GWh of green gas and generated 319 GWh of electricity from 35 Anaerobic Digestion (‘AD’) sites this financial year, enough to power around 90,000 households with electricity and 18,000 with gas for a year.This generation replaces fossil fuels that otherwise would have been required, and avoids 19,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).Across Severn Trent group we generate renewable electricity and gas equivalent to 53% of Severn Trent Water’s electricity use.

We will continue to invest in expanding and improving our AD operations, including upgrading from conventional digestion to a Thermal Hydrolysis Process (THP). This uses heat and pressure to break down the sludge before digestion, resulting in a more efficient process, an enhanced product and higher gas yields.

We are now bringing the circular economy thinking and approach from our AD operations and applying it to the rest of our business.

We are already making good progress in reducing waste to landfill, diverting 87% of our audited waste from landfill. But we are now going beyond this by exploring how we can set ourselves targets not only for landfill diversion but also for material use reduction, reuse, recycling and recovery across all waste streams.

We guide and prioritise this based on evidence on their relative impact and environmental importance. The two largest areas of our business that this applies to are:

• Office and facilities management
• Civil engineering
  

We already achieve up to 99% diversion from landfill in some categories of facilities waste. Improving on this means ensuring that we are working as high up the waste hierarchy (reduce, re-use, recycle) as possible. In practice this means:

(1) being selective and prudent in our procurement and use of material resources,

(2) prolonging the operational life of everything we use, and

(3) at end-of-life, we preserve as much value as we can. (It also means looking at provenance; that is, how what we use is sourced and manufactured, to ensure that it is sustainably produced using the earth’s resources judiciously.

We will put our principles into practice in all parts of the business, in some cases targeting materials specifically for their prominence, and their potential to effect culture change. So we have removed single-use plastic cups and bottles from our head office, a practice we’ll extend to other sites (though COVID-19 safety practices have made this more difficult this year).

There are other areas too, where we can work with our customers to reduce waste generation, such as increasing the rate of paperless billing from the current 42%.