At this point in time, it is no longer feasible for larger companies to separate themselves and their decisions from the impacts they inflict on the environment.
Earth day insighted much reflection amongst our company, and since, we have decided to take greater responsibility when it comes to greenhouse gases. Detailed in this article are the ways in which New Value Solutions will work to make our IT business more sustainable.
What we need to do to get there:
Educate the problem
To promote sustainability in the workspace, we will begin by educating the company on the problem. To be motivated towards the solution, one must first understand the magnitude of the affair. Further, it is important for us to understand what habitual challenges we as an IT company will have to overcome, as a result of our direct contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Moving forward, we will encourage our employees to actively engage in environmental topics and educate themselves on ways in which they can change their work habits to become more sustainable.
Support efforts without ignoring the reality
Sustainable efforts will not go unnoticed. We encourage our employees to shed any notion of comparison when it comes to sustainable practices, as well as the perception that they are ‘just a drop in the ocean’. We should all understand that change starts from within, and each individual contribution means something. Negative insights can be barriers to progress (Ward-Murphy 2021). However, alongside this, it is important that we do not get caught in our ways of engaging in a single sustainable practice. Just because you recycle does not mean you shouldn’t practice other sustainable behaviors, as this gives the impression that you/we are further forward in this challenge because of your single contribution. We are not.
In-cycle
Within the IT world there are many existing habitual challenges in which we need to overcome, such as buying laptops in short cycles. I recently learned that on average, it takes 190,000 liters of water to make one laptop (Ward-Murphy 2021). This creates about 316 kg of CO2 emissions and 1,200kgs of earth needs to be dug out of the ground (Ward-Murphy 2021). It is common for IT companies to dispose and purchase new laptops every three years. This mindset of wanting newer, better, and faster products, significantly contributes to a growing e-waste problem. Moving forward, New Value Solutions will start practicing in-cycling. Instead of discarding these perfectly serviceable devices, we will be donating them instead, to organizations and families in need.
Continue to promote remote work
Post Covid-19, we will continue to encourage our employees to work from home as we always have. There are many environmental advantages to remote work. For obvious reasons, by working from home, our employees contribute less to transportation emissions and running our office requires way less energy. Since majority of our team started working from home, we have seen a notable decrease in our carbon footprint. For this reason, as mentioned previously we will continue to promote remote work for the foreseeable future.
We understand that there is a long journey ahead in the battle of combating climate change. Though our sustainable plan is made up of small contributions, we will continue to educate ourselves on new ways and habits we can implement into our workspace.
Source
How to Make Corporate IT more Sustainable? Ward-Murphy, Daniel. (2021).
How to Make Corporate IT More Sustainable? (globalbankingandfinance.com)
