Belfast City Airport has achieved 'Gold' status in the Northern Ireland Environmental Benchmarking Survey for the third year in a row.

The Business in the Community (BITC) survey, which is sponsored by Moy Park and supported by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, recognises and rewards organisations that are going above and beyond their legal requirements to minimise their environmental impacts and better manage their resources.

The survey is acknowledged as the principle measurement of environmental engagement in Northern Ireland and aims to stress the importance of environmental issues to local businesses and organisations through measuring the extent to which these organisations are managing, and improving performance on, environmental issues.

This is the third year that Belfast City Airport has achieved the 'Gold' status, with a score of more than 80%, having first earned the recognition in 2014.

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Laura Duggan, Environmental Manager at Belfast City Airport, said: "We are delighted that Business in the Community has again recognised our efforts to minimise our environmental impact and improve our performance.

"We have participated in the voluntary survey for many years to demonstrate our commitment to the initiative and to benchmark our environmental management and performance with other organisations across Northern Ireland.

"A key focus for us over the past number of years has been to reduce our waste to landfill in line with BITC's 'Towards Zero Waste' pledge.

"In particular, we have been engaging with our staff and our business partners to increase recycling across the site and, to this end, we have achieved a recycling rate of over 55% this year, up from 50% in 2015."

Belfast City Airport's environmental policy was developed recently to take account of biodiversity, its benefits to the airport, and the airport's impact on it.

Ms Duggan continued: "It was important to us to commit to understanding and addressing the airport's impacts on biodiversity and conserving and enhancing biodiversity, where possible.

"To help us deliver on this policy we have signed up to participate in BITC's Business and Biodiversity Charter, launched earlier this year.

"We are also pleased to hear that there was a substantial increase in participation this year from organisations across Northern Ireland and that Belfast City Airport is among the top performers in terms of its commitment to the environment."

(MH/LM)