The Health and Education Co-operative is owned by 5 North West universities, all with their own individual environmental impact statements and policies.
They have set a high bar for The Health and Education Co-operative.
We aim to exceed these, and in addition to these, we have developed our own environmental delivery objectives!
Our areas of focus are:
• Employee Travel
• Energy used to power our infrastructure
• Buildings and Office Spaces
What are we doing to minimise our impact?
Workplace
Our Work From Home (WFH) policy for both contractors and employees means that at any one time 60% of working hours are spent working from home. Less than 40% of working hours are spent in an office. This reduces the negative environmental impact produced from travelling to and from the office space.
Buildings
Goodbye dedicated offices! We hire desk space in a shared office space which means that the carbon emissions from our work environment are kept to a minimum per person.
Our desks are occupied by others when we are not in the building, so we are not taking up unnecessary space. The office space we hire have and promote the use of their recycling facilities and energy-saving policies to try to further reduce environmental impact.
Travel
Our travel policy actively discourages the use of personal motor vehicles for Business travel. We fully reimburse any costs associated with public transport, whereas we provide for only 25p per mile (almost 50% below HMRC costings). The shared office space encourages cycling to the office with Bike storage facilities on site.
Suppliers
Our finance approval process for suppliers requires us to compare the environmental impact of companies as part of the approval process when sourcing external suppliers.
Infrastructure
Our Servers will be 100% carbon neutral
Our Servers are hosted by (AWS) who have committed to powering all of their services with renewable energy by 2025! We have no on-premises infrastructure to power which helps reduce our carbon footprint and ensure we can provide fantastic uptime performance to our customers.
Offsetting our Carbon Footprint
We have a Climate Friendly Workforce!
In 2021 we began working with our offset partner, Ecologi who support a range of certified carbon reduction projects across the world, This includes the planting of trees every month. We will continue to work with Ecologi to achieve our goal of becoming Carbon Negative. As a company and individuals, we are constantly striving to do our bit for the Environment and striving to meet our goal of being Carbon Negative.
Did you know that Ecologi offsets the carbon footprint of every employee’s lives as well as offsetting any business travel?
In October we also joined the SMB Climate Hub. SMB Climate hub is where small and medium-sized businesses come to curb emissions and gain a competitive edge.
We’ll be reviewing this policy in 2023 but, until then you can review our efforts over on our profile:
Previous Policy Review: June 2021
Next Policy Review: June 2023