AIMS is committed to the principles of environmental protection and sustainable development.
We recognise that environmental impact is one of the most serious and important issues that faces society. This policy sets out our commitment in this area.
AIMS recognises its responsibility to reduce its environmental footprint, commits to continuous improvement in our actions to monitor and control our environmental impact, and formally commits itself to being an environmentally responsible charity, including in terms of the objectives of the campaigning work we do.
We seek to comply with relevant environmental legislation as a minimum level of performance and strive to better our practices to minimise waste, energy and carbon footprints whilst achieving the charity's objectives.
We encourage environmental responsibility amongst all of our staff, volunteers and trustees. All volunteers, trustees and staff members are clearly informed about their responsibility to be aware of, and have a sufficient understanding of the issues covered in this policy and this policy will be included in our Volunteers Handbook.
Our volunteers, trustees and staff members are based in different areas around the UK. Where possible, we make use of telephone or IT-based remote meeting facilities. When AIMS organises face-to-face meetings, we seek to maximise the benefit of these meetings for the charity, take full opportunity of the enhanced opportunity for connecting face-to-face and strongly encourage attendees to travel to the meeting by public transport (or to car share if necessary). Similarly, we strongly encourage travel arrangements to meetings not organised by AIMS to be planned with our environmental policy in mind, and reimburse airfares only exceptionally.
At our meetings, it is our usual practice to provide our own shared catering. We encourage attendees to minimise their use of single use plastic and to recycle as much as possible.
Where there is a choice of acceptable suppliers or venues, AIMS will favour the use of those who are actively working to reduce their environmental impact as long as this does not incur excessive cost to the charity.
We encourage our trustees, volunteers and staff to minimise the printing of documents.
A key AIMS activity is to publish books and the Journal. Every new AIMS publication is available online to download.