Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do – from designing new transport infrastructure to day-to-day operations and responsible procurement.

We are actively involved in helping Greater Manchester meet important strategic environmental commitments on a local and national level.

We’re doing this by managing the city-region’s transport-related air emissions to reduce their impact on the environment and improve local air quality.

We’re working hard for a cleaner, greener Greater Manchester where everyone can thrive.

Our commitment

Since 2008, TfGM has implemented and maintained a certified environmental management system.

We’ve achieved and kept the new internationally recognised standard – ISO 14001: 2015 accreditation – demonstrating our commitment to continuous improvement in our environmental performance.

You can find out more by reading our Health, Safety and Environmental policy.

In our Environment Implementation Plan (2016-21) we’ve made the following commitments:

  • Energy – reduce energy usage at existing TfGM sites.
  • Waste – increase recycling rate to 50% through new initiatives.
  • Water – reduce water usage by 5% through improved monitoring and investigation of inefficiencies by 2021.
  • Fleet – increase the proportion of low-emission vehicles in the fleet by 2021.
  • Project design – all new projects to achieve minimum ‘Good’ standard or above in the sustainable assessment toolkit (SAT) by 2020/1.
  • Procurement – all major purchasing decisions to consider sustainable criteria.
  • Staff travel – increase staff travelling to work by low-emission modes.
  • Biodiversity – develop and implement a policy for managing biodiversity, by maintaining existing natural resources and biodiversity and making improvements.

Reducing our carbon footprint

We’re committed to reducing our carbon footprint.

Our Energy and Carbon Strategy aims to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from any areas we have direct financial and operational control over.

That includes our buildings and fleet vehicles, electricity for Metrolink and fuel for the bus services we support.

We currently have a carbon footprint of 41,000 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per year.

By 2021 we aim to reduce emissions from these operations significantly through major investment in energy efficiency projects and renewable energy schemes.

Energy and Carbon Strategy 2018