Southern highly commended at Innovation awards

Southern has been highly commended at the Rail Industry Innovation awards for its work on making the company more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Innovations such as the introduction of Station Travel Plans, installation of Electric Vehicle Charging Points, waste management and work on biodiversity all contributed to the award.

Southern’s Head of Environment, Sandra Norval said: “We are delighted that we have been recognised for our work to make our company more sustainable. Over the past 10 years, we’ve invested heavily in making our trains and stations more energy efficient, and we have a strong team of Environmental Champions made up of volunteer employees who champion environmental efficiency across the business.

“Sustainability at Southern is more than just improving energy efficiency though. Over the past six years our sustainability work has looked across our passengers’ door-to-door journeys and looked at our role in the communities and environments around us.”

Getting to and From the Station
To support door-to-door journeys, Southern undertook Station Travel Plans at 30 stations and invested in signage and real time bus information as well as layout and infrastructure improvements helping to make stations easier to use. As part of this work we also encouraged passengers to make their journey to the station more sustainable by promoting walking and cycling. We have more than doubled the number of cycle spaces at our stations since our current franchise began in 2009, so there are now over 6,000 cycle parking spaces across the Southern network.

Going Electric
As the trend for alternative fuels for cars continues to grow, particularly with electric vehicles, Southern has installed 50 Electric Vehicle Charging Points (EVCPs) in station car parks across the Southern network as part of a South East-wide initiative to install more points to connect with the Energise network.

Sales of electric vehicles are on the increase and the provision of EVCPs at stations supports Southern’s strategy to encourage more sustainable travel. EVCPs at our stations will help electric vehicle drivers to complete a door-to-door sustainable journey and reduce their carbon footprint even further.

Waste Not
We are aiming to reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill to zero. We have already achieved this at East Croydon station. Based on the success of East Croydon’s zero waste to landfill achievement, work is progressing at Brighton, Eastbourne and Gatwick Airport stations to also achieve 100% recycling. Overall, we are currently recycling 85% of our station waste – a massive improvement compared to our 35% recycling rate at the start of our franchise in 2009.

Southern is also wasting less energy. Since 2009 we have reduced our non-traction electricity consumption by over 25%. All of our trains that have the capability of regenerative braking have been converted to perform this function and we’ve also fitted meters to 98% of our fleet to measure energy consumption so that we can reduce our usage even further.

Biodiversity
Understanding and supporting biodiversity is another area of progress within Southern’s sustainability strategy. Over the past few years we have sat on the West Sussex Environment and Climate Change Board and also worked closely with the Sussex Wildlife Trust.

Our sustainability strategy contains an aspiration to identify suitable projects that will mitigate the impact of an urbanised environment which the railway infrastructure creates and our commitment to local partnerships has helped bring about an initiative called ‘Making a B-Line for Sussex’. Students from the University of Sussex, the Sussex Community Rail Partnership and the Brighton Biosphere are creating small gardens at stations in the Brighton area which build ecosystems to support local bees, birds, and butterflies. Led by Southern’s Environmental Champions, this project complements the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs’ commitment to create local nature partnerships made in the Policy for Protecting Biodiversity and Ecosystems.