EnviroMall, a partnership between The Mall and leading environmental organisations Envirowise, Upstream, the Carbon Trust and the Energy Efficiency Accreditation Scheme, will encourage the sharing of best practice and joined up working across the UK's shopping centres on all areas of environmental sustainability including recycling, waste, water and electricity emmisions as well as raising awareness. The scheme will also reach out to retailers, who collectively have been hard to engage before now.

On a practical level it will also provide the opportunity to trial breakthrough thinking and technologies in complex testing grounds with the ultimate goal of achieving a Self Sustainable Specification for each individual centre throughout the UK. And already much interest has been generated.

Ken Ford, chief executive of The Mall, is very environmentally aware and with much talk lately of climate change, he sees this as the next logical step.

He said: "Protecting the environment is the big issue facing society today. The shopping centre industry can adopt a position of leadership and influence, touching as it does so many people's lives, whether shoppers, retailers or investors.

"The time is now to take all the good work The Mall and others are doing in this area and galvanise it into an independently accredited industry standard - EnviroMall. We see EnviroMall as the necessary next step to call others in the business to action. There is a need for this standard for us to all march behind and we hope that other owner/operators will welcome this initiative and be encouraged to join EnviroMall."

All shopping centres under the scheme will be audited, and advice and support will be available from all partners working within EnviroMall in a bid to improve sustainability.

Envirowise provides resource efficiency advice to the retail sector, including the management of environmental campaigns for a wide range of shopping centres in England. Envirowise retail specialist Chris Hodgson said: "We encourage centres to work in partnership with their retailers to implement a range of resource saving and waste reducing measures.

"EnviroMall will enable us to work with around 10 per cent of the UK's shopping centres, with the owner/operator's absolute support. The EnviroMall approach should lead to significant improvements in environmental performance."

Upstream - the strategic sustainability consultancy specialising in property - is working with the partnership in an advisory capacity to impart expertise gained through its own Sustainability Benchmarking service. Upstream's Matthew Tippett believes the initiative represents a good opportunity to spark further sharing of good and best practice. "Ultimately, Upstream is keen to promote work that drives the property industry forward and makes a meaningful contribution to major challenges, such as climate changes," he said.

The EnviroMall partnership will be working closely over the coming months to devise the accreditation system and it is anticipated a toolkit will be available in six months.

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