With the growing expectations and responsibilities regarding businesses’ environmental footprint, sustainability has become a crucial component for our business strategy. Digital sustainability requires addressing specific issues with problem-specific solutions, to leverage technology, as well as non-technical innovations.

The technology industry can’t avoid using power. As a business, we are conscious of the environmental impact of using and providing technology products and services. Reducing both, our direct emissions and the indirect emissions created by our supply chain is a key component to minimise the long-term environmental impact of our operations and that of our clients.

Since last year, we started working on the strategy to achieve ISO 14001 – Environmental Management accreditation status, which has evolved into a ESG strategy project, led by David Raper, Operations Director on the Environmental, Joanne Finkeldey, People Director on the Social, and Alan Timothy, Non-Executive Director on the Governance.

Developing this strategy comes from our commitment to be an ethical business, committed to high standards while decreasing the negative environmental impacts of our services, activities, and products. The formal strategy is set to be completed before the end of this year, which will be made up of policies to support our wide ESG goals and provide a formal process to achieve the environmental certification next year. Our long-term goal is becoming a carbon neutral business by 2030.

We might be at the early stages of the formal process, but we started the journey to Net-Zero and decarbonisation a while back by implementing efficient systems and processes to reduce our impact. In the last couple of years, we have made sure that our offices are powered by renewable electricity and equipped with heat recovery and LED lighting to decrease our company wide carbon footprint.

We are 99% paperless, we dispose equipment through accredited recycling businesses, our data centres are carbon neutral, we have installed electric charging points at three of our offices and we are working towards an electric fleet by 2025.

Decarbonising a business comes with many challenges and many times it can be difficult to calculate the total carbon footprint and the extent of employees’ impact in a company’s emissions. Implementing our environmental policies effectively will require a culture shift to support a net zero working culture. It will ultimately be a team effort, where we will seek for everyone’s input to create internal campaigns aimed to minimise our own people’s contribution.

The journey might not be straightforward, we are aware that as we learn from the process, we will have to adapt to improve our efficiency at reducing our environmental impact and that of our stakeholders. Working towards net-zero is imperative to create sustainable success and have a lasting positive impact on people and the planet.