We often get asked what we are doing to encourage sustainability. Rightly, customers, partners and others are aware that innovation comes with an environmental price tag – hosting infrastructure has an emissions cost.
It is for this reason that we are happy to become a part of Tech Zero, the UK-wide, government-backed scheme to promote lower emissions and more sustainable practices from technology companies. The scheme currently has more than 200 participants, including Starling Bank, Revolut, what3words and Vodafone.
Signatories have a year to create a target date for their organization to hit zero emissions and outline a plan of how they will achieve that milestone. Each organization pledges to measure and publish all Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions – that is direct greenhouse gas emissions, indirect emissions, and those associated with its supply chain. Tech Zero provides advice and a toolkit to help companies plan and prepare to hit zero emissions.
The first step is measuring our existing emissions. Then we start thinking about how we can reduce or offset them. It’s all part of our desire to be a purpose-led business: we want to be environmental leaders in our field and inspire others to follow. We also want to bring our supply chain partners with us.
We have been impressed by the early reaction: 20 volunteers have signed up already from all parts of the business, all of whom want to be environmental champions as part of our broader sustainability drive.
We have already started building sustainability into the way our underlying platform works. As well as our recent acquisition of SnapLabs, which employs Elastic Computing to minimize server usage, we are also looking at ways of minimizing our load on Amazon Web Services.
Although there’s no definite target date set yet, we intend to move faster than Tech Zero’s overall target of net zero by 2050 and halving emissions by 2030.
We’ll have more on the blog charting our progress as this initiative progresses.
Alice Dunn
General Counsel,
Immersive Labs