Environmental Sustainability

As a firm, we believe we have a responsibility not only to our clients but also to our community and our planet. We believe in operating our business in a way which will have a positive impact on our clients, our people, and the communities that we live and work within.

We have already implemented a wide variety of policies to reduce the firm’s carbon footprint, including purchasing all our energy from sustainable sources and implementing energy efficiency measures within our offices, but have now taken the next step on our journey to Net Zero.

Led by our internal Environmental Sustainability Group we have initiated a project with the aim of achieving Net Zero no later than 2050. In order to achieve this, we have partnered with Auditel, specialist consultants who help organisations become ‘Verified Carbon Neutral’ in a measurable, meaningful and hopefully self-funding way!

Our approach

• We have produced the Ashtons Legal Environmental Statement.
• We started the process of measuring our ‘Base Line’ to establish our existing carbon footprint. For this, we gathered data for the year 2023/24. The data captured fell within three ‘Scopes of Emissions’:
  • Scope 1 – Direct Emissions – Things under our control that directly emit Carbon – such as company vehicles, replacement gas for air conditioning units.
  • Scope 2 – The amount of Electricity we use in our buildings.
  • Scope 3 – The largest and most difficult to measure; waste from operations, business travel, commuting, and our requirements of our supply chain.

What have we achieved so far?

In our most recent calculation for the 2024/2025 reporting year, we have seen an 8% reduction in location-based emissions and 20% reduction in market-based emissions.

In the past year, we have not only transitioned more of our offices to renewable electricity, but we have also:

• Worked on reducing emissions from our supply chain by consolidating suppliers and reducing the number of deliveries.
• Reducing the amount of waste which goes to landfill.
• Improved the quality of data used in our carbon footprint, including asking for additional information in our employee commuting and homeworking survey, which remains an important part of our data collection given emissions from commuting/homeworking account for 74% of our overall footprint.