Artelia is strongly committed to the energy transition and sustainable development, and helps its clients to reduce the environmental footprint of their projects, while also ensuring that a sustainable approach is adopted for its own activities.
Promoting eco-design
Eco-design requires our engineers to substantially change the way they work. The key to maximising our contribution to reducing the environmental footprint of our clients’ projects lies in the quality of the consultancy services and studies that we provide and our ability to incorporate all the facets of sustainable development into our project assignments. This premise applies to all Artelia’s markets and business lines.
ECO-DESIGN IN BUILDING CONSTRUCTION
Artelia’s Sustainable Buildings activity brings together 45 specialists in environmental performance, energy efficiency and occupant comfort in buildings during the design, construction and operation phases. Our high-calibre consultancy, design and works supervision services include five key areas of expertise :
Sensitive to environmental concerns and steeped in a culture of creativity and innovation, our services go beyond the scope of environmental certifications and eco-labels (HQE, BREEAM, LEED, WELL, BBCA, Effinergie, E+C-).
We view a building as rendering a service for its future users and pay special attention to minimising its environmental footprint and maximising comfort, adopting a life-cycle approach to ensure long-term durability. Drawing on our extensive know-how and experience, we are able to commit ourselves as to the building’s future energy consumption at the design stage and guarantee its performance in operation.
Since 2006 we have successfully accompanied more than 350 new or refurbished real-estate projects representing 2.7 million m² in operation.
ECO-DESIGN IN URBAN DEVELOPMENT
By 2050, nearly 80% of the world’s population will live in cities. Sober, resilient, pleasant, concerted: if it is to be sustainable, a city must constantly reinvent itself in order to address an array of challenges including energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, waste production, mobility, mixed uses, functionality of amenities, drinking water supply and wastewater treatment.
Thanks to its multi-disciplinary teams located close to its clients in France and around the world, Artelia has the full range of skills needed to adopt an integrated, innovative, sustainable approach to urban development, reconciling the principles of the circular economy with a high quality of life.
ECO-DESIGN IN REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Assessing the issues inherent to a region or a project to identify the solution with the best overall value added, accompanying the project with suitable measures and ensuring that they are implemented in the field - including through the environmental supervision of works - are part of everyday life for our teams.
Analysing and protecting water resources, assessing the impact of climate change, modelling natural hazards, anticipating extreme events, evaluating the potential for renewable energy and implementing power generation schemes, are some of the key skills that our teams can offer as their contribution to sustainable regional development.
Adopting an eco-responsible approach for our activities
Although the environmental impacts of our internal activities (e.g. travel, real-estate asset management, office activities) are marginal in comparison with the challenges of our project assignments, assessing them and gradually reducing them is a means of fostering a shared culture of sustainability within Artelia.
By the end of 2019, this target had been reached and even exceeded, with the Group reporting a 26% reduction (kg CO2eq per employee) of its emissions compared to 2014 levels.
TRAVEL
Our travel consumes non-renewable resources and produces greenhouse gas and atmospheric pollutant emissions.
Artelia is seeking to reduce travel first and foremost, and thereby our impact, by encouraging the use of video conferencing, either in groups or station-to-station. It is now used at all of Artelia’s sites, and our indicators show that it has substantially reduced the number of business trips made.
The group has rolled out a travel policy that encourages employees to prefer rail travel over road or air travel and includes recommendations concerning personal safety and vehicle selection for short-term rentals. For its own fleets or vehicles on long-term rentals, Artelia has capped carbon emissions at 120g per km.
In accordance with the provisions of French legislation, the Group’s carbon assessment was updated in 2020 and also incorporates the unavoidable aspects of impacts related to commuting between home and the workplace.
REAL-ESTATE ASSET MANAGEMENT
We systematically include environmental criteria (energy and environmental efficiency, distance to public transportation, bicycle sheds, etc.) when selecting new premises, whether for rental or purchase. We try to find common measures for improving energy consumption with the owners of premises we rent, but are focusing our effort in this domain on the sites that we own.
OFFICE ACTIVITIES
ecycled paper is used for all standard formats, and we regularly roll out sorting and collection systems for recycling waste paper at suitable group sites.
In addition, selective waste sorting has been introduced at our Patio Seine site in Choisy-le-Roi, concerning paper and board but also plastic cups and bottles and drink cans in order to cover all the main waste types generated at the site. Drop-off points (bearing suitable logos) have been set up in the relaxation areas, printing areas and other key locations.
Computer hardware systematically carries the “Energy Star” service mark, and waste electrical and electronic equipment and the associated consumables are disposed of by the Information Services Department and its service providers in accordance with current legislation. We have developed a tool for optimising the capacities of some of our workstations on an ad-hoc basis, and this is highly beneficial in terms of improving energy efficiency.
On the road to carbon neutrality
We have chosen to go down the path of carbon offsetting, in order to compensate for our incompressible GHG emissions and thus reduce our emissions by 50% by 2025. In partnership with the Artelia Foundation, our objective is to carry out projects that avoid the emission or sequester tons of CO2, in various sectors such as renewable energies or biodiversity protection, in connection with our businesses.