Eurostar is reaping the green business benefits of joining forces with Friends of the Earth

Planning a business trip to Paris? A return flight from London Luton airport to Charles de Gaulle produces 103kg of carbon dioxide per passenger; a return journey by Eurostar from London’s St Pancras International to Gare du Nord produces 6.6kg. How about a summer holiday in the south of France? A return flight from Heathrow to Marseilles produces 197kg of CO2 per passenger; return travel by Eurostar from St Pancras to Avignon produces 13kg.

These statistics, from a study by Paul Watkiss Associates commissioned by Eurostar, highlight the environmental benefits of travelling by rail rather than air. Richard Brown, Eurostar’s chief executive, realises the stats highlight potential marketing benefits, too. “We are in a very fortunate position at Eurostar,” Brown told participants at Ethical Corporation’s responsible business summit in May. “The majority of our corporate customers want to reduce their emissions and see us as a way to do that. We are low carbon, and we see this as a way to establish and strengthen our competitive advantage.”

To help maximise that advantage, Eurostar has turned to a somewhat unusual partner – environmental group Friends of the Earth (FoE). Part environmental campaign and part marketing effort, the Eurostar-FoE alliance is yet another example of how major companies are collaborating with non-governmental organisations to achieve business as well as social goals.

Business-NGO partnerships are increasingly common. Management and technology consultancy Accenture, for example, offers discounted services to non-profit groups and social enterprises in the development sector. And Cancer Research Technology, the commercial arm of the Cancer Research UK charity, announced in May that it would fund trials of a GlaxoSmithKline drug – and take a cut of the profits if it is a success.

In theory, such collaborations are win-win propositions. The NGO benefits from the company’s marketing muscle and commercial clout, while the company benefits from what Brown calls “third party validation”, the ethical and environmental stamp of approval only NGOs can deliver. The execution, however, can be tricky, requiring a deft mix of pragmatics and principle from both sides.

Scratch my back…

The Eurostar-FoE relationship began two years ago, when Eurostar approached FoE for advice on its Tread Lightly initiative to reduce the firm’s ecological footprint. Since October 2007, Friends of the Earth has been providing a kind of environmental consultancy service, advising Eurostar on how to reduce its environmental impact, including its carbon emissions. In return, Eurostar supports FoE’s political goals, such as last year’s Big Ask campaign to persuade the British government to strengthen its climate change bill. Richard Brown himself publicly supported the FoE initiative and even lobbied his own MP. He also wrote to a cross-party group of MPs urging them to strengthen the bill.

The partnership clearly makes sense for Eurostar. Business customers want to travel by train to help them reduce emissions in line with publicly-stated climate change targets. Trains are inherently greener than planes, and for Eurostar there is an obvious business upside to lobbying the government, as the Big Ask campaign did, to include emissions from international aviation and shipping in its climate change bill calculations.

The calculation is more complex for FoE, though. Eurostar trains run on electricity largely supplied by nuclear power plants. That is certainly a low-carbon source, but many of FoE’s supporters might not consider it exactly green. Indeed, FoE itself opposes the construction of new nuclear power plants, promoting renewables instead. And here is where the pragmatism comes in.

“We are keen to promote rail regardless of the fuel source,” says Roger Higman, head of campaign coordination for FoE in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (EWNI). “People feel strongly about the nuclear issue, but we have to balance that against the need to take action against climate change.” FoE sees Eurostar’s provision of low-carbon transport to continental Europe as proof that solutions to climate change already exist, even if those solutions may not be perfect.

The Eurostar relationship represents something of a strategic shift for FoE. The group has been much more reluctant than other environmental campaigners, notably WWF, to form partnerships with the private sector.

Little action

A few years ago, FoE spent time working behind the scenes with BP and Shell, giving presentations to and holding meetings with executives. But, according to Higman, it was too much talk and too little action. Ultimately, FoE concluded, both companies were still in the fossil fuel business – and probably always would be. “We felt we weren’t working with the sectors that wanted to improve,” Higman says. “We wanted to demonstrate that there are companies doing progressive stuff. If you want to get more people travelling by train, the experts are Eurostar.”

By focusing on solutions, on the achievable rather than the ideal, FoE is trying to avoid situations in which best environmental practice becomes the enemy of good enough environmental practice. This can, of course, lead to apparent contradictions, such as the promotion of nuclear-powered train travel and the opposition to the construction of new nuclear power plants.

The same solutions-oriented calculation is behind FoE’s withdrawal of support for Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood. Certification by the FSC has been generally considered the best available standard for new wood, and FoE has recommended it for a long time. But in September last year, spurred by concerns about the FSC’s ability to guarantee rigorous environmental and social standards, FoE EWNI stopped recommending FSC-certified wood – at least until changes had been made to ensure that the certification process was sound. The decision is ironic, since FoE EWNI was one of the founders of the FSC back in 1993.

“We would like to support FSC again,” Higman says, “but we felt there were other choices we could recommend, like using recycled wood, wood from local sources, or buying second-hand furniture.” FoE is supporting a review to beef up the FSC scheme.

These kinds of decisions may puzzle, and even anger, some. But to Higman they are part of the imperative to stop talking so much about problems and start implementing solutions. “The challenge is getting businesses, people and governments to change so we can do the things we want to do without causing [environmental] problems,” Higman says. “The people who are experts in doing things are companies, not Friends of the Earth. We can learn from companies that provide public transport, for example, and tailor our campaigns to support them. And they can learn from us.”

And that is exactly what the collaboration with Eurostar is intended to do. FoE is “a critical friend”, says Louisa Bell, Eurostar’s head of environment and energy. “It is very helpful to have an outside viewpoint, and [FoE] push us really quite hard on things.”

Staff from the two organisations talk about once a week, Bell says. When Eurostar has a question or a dilemma – whether to serve local, organic, or fair trade food on board, for example – someone from Eurostar contacts someone at FoE. Very often Eurostar will already have done its own research on the issue, and FoE acts as a sounding board and referral service, talking through options and suggesting possible solutions. Eurostar has no ongoing donation arrangement with FoE, but it does give a small number of complimentary tickets to FoE staff and did provide some funding for a 2007 FoE research project.

FoE’s main contribution has been to Eurostar’s Tread Lightly programme, which has reduced carbon emissions per traveller journey by 31% over the past two years. Eurostar’s target is to reduce CO2 per traveller journey by 35% by 2012, compared with the 2007 level. The company is working towards this goal across its entire operations, from increasing the efficiency of onboard heating, lighting and air-conditioning systems, to washing trains with collected rainwater to repurposing old staff uniforms. One train has even been fitted with an energy meter to provide baseline data against which to measure consumption.

For the past two years, Eurostar has made all passenger journeys carbon-neutral through investments in offsetting projects. The company supports a 50MW wind farm in China, for example, and a 22.5MW hydroelectric power plant in India, among other initiatives. All projects are audited by inspection and certification firm Bureau Veritas, another crucial aspect of Brown’s emphasis on third party validation.

Still, Eurostar faces its own difficult choices between best and good enough. Eurostar trains run on four different networks, for example, and a good portion of its CO2 reductions are a result of one of these networks, Eurotunnel, recently switching to a less carbon-intensive energy supplier, and Eurostar carrying more passengers on the Eurotunnel route. If a different supplier had been chosen or fewer people had travelled, emissions might have gone up. Either way, Eurostar has limited control over where its electricity comes from. “Nuclear power is a low-emissions source,” Bell says. “But if we could get sufficient supplies of even cleaner energy, we would do it.”

Food for thought

Food is another issue where the green thing to do is not always obvious, and it’s an issue on which Eurostar has sought FoE’s help. Weighing up the pros and cons of local versus organic or fair trade is complicated.

“Eurostar needs advice,” Bell says. “So we put Friends of the Earth food experts in touch with our catering team and suppliers.” Eurostar’s review is still in progress, but a range of on-board food is now sourced from the country of departure and some of it is organic. All tea, coffee and sugar is certified by the Fairtrade Foundation or the Rainforest Alliance, or as organic.

“Food is a real dilemma,” Higman adds. “We have to ask: ‘what is the difference between doing nothing and doing something?’ Not everything may be sourced down to the most perfect thing possible, but we can give Eurostar things to think about and people to talk to.”

Eurostar may be able to specify what kind of food to serve on board, but not what happens to the waste afterwards. The company is in the process of trying out an onboard waste separation process. So far, 10 of Eurostar’s 27 trains have labelled bins. But the success of the scheme depends on waste management procedures at the stations Eurostar services. The original target was to recycle 80% of all waste by the end of this year. That goal has been pushed back to 2012, in part because Eurostar does not control all the agreements with contractors that handle the firm’s waste.

Given the tradeoffs involved in decisions like these, Eurostar and FoE don’t always agree on the best course of action. FSC certification – no longer in favour with FoE – is a case in point. Eurostar has reduced its A4 paper use by 28% over the past two years. But the firm still needs to use paper, and when it does, Bell says, “we use FSC-accredited paper wherever possible”.

Bell is well aware that this is not a perfect solution. “Just because it’s FSC, don’t think it doesn’t have an impact,” she says. “The first step is to reduce paper use. Then we need to make a judgment for the remainder: what do we use?” Eurostar intends to cut back even further on its paper use by switching to e-tickets and enabling travellers to download ticketing bar codes onto their mobile phones.

What happens when Eurostar and FoE disagree? “Then we have a conversation,” Bell says. “There’s a good chance we will learn something. But we make our own judgment on what to do.”

“We are not judge and jury for everything a company does,” Higman adds. “We want to make sure the decision-making process is good rather than come back with a definitive answer. We are interested in having a conversation rather than sitting on high and pronouncing judgment.”

That kind of principled pragmatism is essential to making partnerships like the one between Eurostar and FoE work. Should you use FSC-certified paper, despite doubts around the certification process? Should you support nuclear-powered train travel, despite opposition to nuclear power itself? The ethical and ecological equations behind these questions are complex, for business and NGOs alike. But sometimes the bottom line is that doing something is better than doing nothing.

A lighter footprint

Eurostar’s Tread Lightly programme is a 10-point company-wide plan to reduce the environmental impact of Eurostar operations.

  • 2006: Eurostar commissions research that finds a journey on its trains from London to Paris or Brussels generates one-tenth of the CO2 produced by flying.
  • April 2007: Eurostar pledges to cut its CO2 emissions by 25% per traveller journey by 2012.
  • October 2007: Eurostar and Friends of the Earth launch a partnership, calling on the UK government to strengthen the climate change bill.
  • November 2007: Eurostar makes all journeys carbon neutral, offsetting all CO2 that it is has not reduced.
  • April 2009: Helped by Eurotunnel’s switch to nuclear powered electricity supply, Eurostar reports a 31% reduction in CO2 emissions in 2008.
  • April 2009: Eurostar raises its emissions reduction target to 35% by 2012.

Consumers want greener travel

A Eurostar consumer survey in February 2009 found:

  • at least half the public across France (56%), Belgium (50%) and the UK (54%) say their commitment to reducing emissions is unaffected by the economic downturn;
  • for holiday travel, 37% in Belgium, 39% in France and 48% in the UK take the environmental impact into account before booking; and
  • more than 70% of consumers feel businesses need to do more than simple box-ticking on the environment.


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