During the past year we have continued to work towards improving the environmental sustainability of our business. We believe that protecting and enhancing the environment is the right thing to do for our business and our stakeholders.
We maintained a solid focus on well-established activities such as managing leakage from our water network, where we hit our target for the fourth year running despite the coldest winter for over 10 years. In our wastewater treatment works compliance, we reduced the number of failing works from 8 in 2008 to 5 in 2009 (we have nearly 600 works in total).
In addition we made good progress in some of our more recent programmes such as waste and resource use, sustainable capital investment, sustainable catchment management and biodiversity. We are aiming to introduce new approaches in these areas, demonstrating and embedding solutions to deal with the most pressing sustainability issues.
We recycled over 91% of the 1.05 million tonnes of waste that we manage in 2009/10 and our target for next year is 95%. Also in 2009/10 46% of the aggregates we used in network re-instatement came from a recycled source with a target of 50% for next year.
We are now in our first year of AMP5 (Asset Management Plan) – a five-year period of investment in our assets from 2010–2015. Over the next five years we will be spending £3.6 billion delivering improvements that will enhance our environment and the service our customers receive.
In 2009 we implemented new ways of managing biodiversity on a number of pilot operational sites. This year we secured regulatory funding to extend our pilot programme to a further 16 operational water sites over the next five years.
We have now met or outperformed our medium-term target of a 50% reduction in major pollution incidents in each of the last four years. One water and seven wastewater Category 1&2 incidents were recorded in 2009, compared with the base position of two water and 21 wastewater incidents in 2005
Find out more about carbon management and sustainable supply chain separately in this report.