Preserving the planet’s biodiversity is a key aim of sustainable development and involves all sectors of society. Our commercial operations have the potential to impact on biodiversity in many ways. For Alliance Boots, the two main areas of impact arise from the sourcing of raw materials and from the facilities we operate.
Our environmental management processes seek to minimise the negative impacts of these activities. We take account of protected species and habitats, as required by national and international legislation, and encourage opportunities to promote biodiversity.
The impact of chemicals on human health and the environment has long been a matter of concern for manufacturers and retailers in relation to product formulation, development and manufacture. To regulate our chemicals usage across our retail products we have set realistic but challenging targets to monitor and manage our usage and related impact.
There is a finite amount of freshwater on the planet, (only 3% of total water in the world is freshwater and less than 1% is usable by humans). Rapid growth in human population and accelerating levels of consumption coupled with a greater risk to availability due to climate change mean that the world’s water supplies are under increasing stress.
Water scarcity implications for Alliance Boots will mainly concern the products we develop, manufacture and sell and we have a programme to address water management in our manufacturing operations.
In June 2008, Boots UK obtained a grant from The Technology Strategy Board, an executive non-departmental public body established by the UK Government in 2007, to develop, in collaboration with both academic and industrial partners, processes that could enable algae to be grown utilising carbon dioxide emissions from the combined heat and power plant (CHP) in Nottingham.
The focus of the project during the financial year 2009/10 was on the construction of an outdoor photo-bioreactor under licence, which is now in operation, with a view to establishing production of the algae early in the 2010/11 financial year. The major focus for the next year will specifically be on the outputs from the cultivation, namely the down-stream processing of the biomass and identification of valuable cosmetic bioactive extracts with proprietary efficacy claims. A key ambition for us will be to develop microalgae derived bio-molecules as a potential alternative to petrochemical ingredients currently used in our products.
The algal cultivation and carbon capture technology is the culmination of 28 years microalgal biotechnology R&D by the project’s proposer and the CHP microalgae project is now globally recognised as one of the leading ventures demonstrating the utilisation of carbon emissions to create sustainable products, and thus mitigate climate change.
Our associate Alliance Healthcare Portugal contributed towards re-foresting areas that had been burnt by forest fires by offering 1,000 trees in the area of Alcanena. In December, a group of four volunteers from the Lisbon offices helped plant some of the trees, together with a group of local school children. This way, apart from directly improving the environment in the affected area, we helped to compensate for the CO2 emissions related to our activity.