The Environment Partners Clubs Approach
As part of their work on the environment, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Paris-Orly and paris-Le Bourget airports opened their Environment Partners Clubs in 2003, 2005 and 2006 respectively.
Their Purpose
The purpose of these structures is to commit companies operating at the airports to implementing an Environmental Management System covering their operations and to thereby make Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Paris-Orly and Paris-Le Bourget truly environmentally friendly airports. Today, these Clubs, in addition to offering a resource centre for best environmental practices, are becoming the new driving forces behind the airport Environmental Management Systems.
Their Workings
The Environment Partners Clubs at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly airports operate on the basis of the three pillars that form an Environmental Management System: gathering information, training staff/raising their awareness and self-evaluation to foster improvements.
- Gathering information: An Internet media called the Environment Extranet serves as the platform for exchanges between companies.www.ecoairport.fr.
This is also the place where airport environmental news is released and for listing the best practices applied by the various parties. This media is supported by a quarterly newsletter. The extranet was designed by Club members to reflect their needs.
- Training staff/raising awareness: Working groups are created according to the member's needs and requests. There are also tools such as awareness material (copyright free videos, information booklets and brochures, etc.), information on the environment covering both general subjects and airport-specific issues, regulatory subjects by theme, and all the latest news of the partners' clubs. Awareness actions and actions are organized through national or European events, such as the National Sustainable Development Week, the European Mobility Week, and next November, the first European Week for Waste Reduction.
- Self-evaluation: An environmental diagnosis tool, écocarte, is available on the ecoairport website. This is a 3-page questionnaire to assess the main environmental impacts, the actions to control such impacts, and the environmental management system in 5 points