Ethos

The environmental crisis can be viewed as a design crisis. It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed and landscapes are used. Unsustainable design has created this, thus the challenge is to harmonise human activity with the earth’s fragile biosphere by ensuring design is sustainable.

From the design of private gardens, to the planning of new cities or regions, Randle Siddeley Associates strives to explore new ways of designing to optimise ecological and sustainable design principles.

The RSA sustainability ‘champion’ is senior member of the design team and is personally responsible for developing guiding principles and new strategies for sustainable landscape and urban design. We have a series of tools to measure our own designs and a series of processes to assess projects for other designers.

RSA carry out all activities in accordance with ISO 9001:2000 Quality Assurance procedures and are working towards ISO 14001 Environmental Management System.

RSA’s Green Office Management Statement:
As a practice, RSA takes environmental responsibilities very seriously and endeavours to negate any adverse impacts that our activities may have on the environment. RSA strives to apply our environmental aspirations not only to our designs ethos but also into a Green Office Management Policy.

The principal methods of managing and reducing our office impacts are through improving daily energy, water and waste efficiency operations. The Green Office Management Policy aim is to promote and encourage excellent Green principles and provide the right working conditions for our employees to exercise these ideologies in the everyday working environment.

This is accomplished by:

• Ensuring energy efficient light bulbs are used
• Minimising printing by electronic filing
• Investigating green electricity tariffs for the premises
• Investigating installation of water meters to monitor consumption of water
• Having movement sensitive lighting in stairwells
• Ensuring office equipment including computers, printers and mobile phones are recycled at end of their life
• All unused electrical appliances are turned off at end of working day
• Procuring chlorine-free and recycled paper for office use
• Pre-setting office equipment defaults to reduce consumption where possible (e.g. printer settings to print double sided and the use of ‘Ecofont’, which uses 20% less ink)
• CPD seminars are provided to educate and promote and sustainable principles
• Encourage cycling and travelling to work by foot
• Encourage the use of public transportation and cycling to meetings and to and from work, secure cycle stands provided within the shared courtyard
• Providing RSA’s Green Office Protocol to all employees, including information regarding: Green travel plans, health benefits, recycling, waste reduction, turning off lights, turning off computers servers and monitors and kitchen energy savings measures (i.e. only boiling the required amount of water).

The office ‘environmental champion’ implements and manages the day to day running of this policy, though it is the responsibility of all RSA employees to actively engage and endorse the Green Office Management Policy in their everyday work. This Policy will be reviewed annually and amended as appropriate.