you are in Sustainability
We are committed to maintaining carbon neutrality for our operations and conserving resources for the well-being of our stakeholders and future generations.
We are cognisant of the direct environmental impact resulting from our operations across our network. We seek to mitigate our carbon footprint by building a more energy- and resource-efficient real estate portfolio and encouraging environmental stewardship at the workplace.
Our direct impact on the environment results primarily from consuming resources, including energy, water, paper, and other supplies. The waste products resulting from the production, transport, consumption, and disposal of our resources include greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, wastewater and office waste. As such, we concentrate our efforts on energy conservation and resource management through optimisation, digitalisation and workflow automation, and stay committed to managing our premises efficiently in alignment with industry best practices and leading green building certification standards.
In 2021, UOB became the first Singapore bank to achieve operational carbon neutrality for our own footprint, including our Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 (business air travel) emissions. We are committed to maintaining our carbon neutrality as we move towards a low carbon economy. In this regard, we have established a decarbonisation roadmap for our real estate portfolio through the deployment of energy conservation measures, use of renewable energy and power purchase agreements (PPAs), and carbon offsets.
We aim to first reduce energy consumption and use renewable energy to mitigate the majority of our operational carbon emissions. However, we recognise that there will be hard-to-abate emissions (in particular Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions) which may only be addressed through the use of carbon offsets. We seek to ensure that the carbon offsets we purchase are real, quantifiable, additional, permanent and registered with international standards.
We are adding more sustainability features across our buildings including:
More efficient LED lighting systems
Smart building sensors to manage lighting and lifts optimally
Upgraded air-conditioning systems with lower energy use
We will switch to clean energy sources through:
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) in projects, such as solar, wind and geothermal
Virtual Power Purchase Agreements from projects such as solar
We will support carbon emissions reduction programmes such as:
Solar energy and solar cooker projects
Biomass waste-to-energy projects
Nature-based projects
We work actively to achieve measurable reductions in energy and resource consumption by adopting new and efficient technologies to upgrade our current systems.
Examples include:
To achieve holistic sustainability performance for our properties, we use leading green building certification schemes, such as the Singapore Building and Construction Authority’s (BCA) Green Mark, for our newly-acquired or retrofitted buildings and office spaces. This helps to benchmark the green efforts of our Group portfolio wherever applicable.
We also adhere to the requirements of the latest green building rating criteria including the BCA Green Mark 2021 for the design of systems in our buildings.
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