Ozone depleters, Carbon emissions, Solvent emissions, Water pollution, Site of Special Scientific Interest, Wildlife Protection, Conservation, Sustainable development, endangered species, clean air act, energy consumption………
….…..just some of the terms that most people would recognise and would possibly regard as having something to do with them and protection of “the Environment”
There are, of course, many other phrases that could be included such as Global Warming or Climate Change and there are many advertisements declaring how “green” a product is, or how a company is planning to improve their product.
Of course, we can all legitimately claim that all of us have been contributing to improving our product for years, which you can judge by the resulting number of lives saved and not just because it looks good to potential customers.
In the ESCAPE magazine, focus is placed on achievements and we, as individuals and as a company, have taken deliberate action that has lead to making significant achievements in the way that we affect our environment.
This is something else we have been improving for some years now and so this issue is focussed on documenting some of these achievements to provide an insight into how and why certain issues are managed the way they are, and to give an idea of the challenges that we all still face to improve the environment.
Since its foundation in the late 1920’s, Martin-Baker has operated a policy of continuous improvement across all areas of the business. During the early nineties the Board of Directors made a decision to evaluate what parts of our business were impacting the environment and to then look into what could be done to improve them.
Over the course of the next 15 years the Company made significant long term capital investments on equipment and process changes that have led to a range of improvements that you can now read about over the following pages. This experience has taught us that having a committed environmental policy can lead to savings across the business and not just the presumed expenditure.
These investments, as well as a lot of hard work from many people around the business, have led to many awards and public acknowledgments of our dedication to environmental issues - culminating in the prestigious Queens Award for Sustainable Development in 2004. Since then the Company has stuck to its cornerstone policy of continuous improvement with so many more notable accomplishments having been met.
The aims of this edition of Escape are to bring greater attention to what has been achieved by the Company over the last 15 years as well as to remind and encourage all of us that even more can be done to reduce energy consumption; increase our water conservation, expand our recycling and come up with even more innovative ways to manage our waste and pollution both at work and at home.