2022 has been quite a volatile year, especially from a sustainability perspective. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and subsequent Western sanctions, put new pressures on already strained oil and gas supplies, with major world economies scrambling to respond. Rapidly rising energy prices, amongst various other pressures on the grid, have showed us just how desperately we need more affordable and sustainable sources of energy.
Luckily, clean technology investments are also ramping up, with solar and wind generation now expected to more than double by 2027. Investments in battery energy storage, low-emissions hydrogen, and CO2 capture are expected to increase as well.
As a global technology company, we’re committed to furthering the goals of the Clean Energy Transition, and that starts with actions both big and small. Our aim is to become more sustainable each day and every day, and to do so, we’ve already taken a number of proactive climates stances.
This past year, as part of our EcoVadis certification, we established a company-wide environmental policy in order to act upon measurable sustainability goals, while increasing our awareness and knowledge of environmental protection issues. We created these goals with the intention of saving energy and natural resources, preventing pollution, and reducing costs resulting from a lack of environmental awareness.
Here at CoreMedia, we’re committed to minimizing energy consumption, and all employees are encouraged to conserve wherever they can. This includes daily action items, like being mindful of electricity, water, and paper consumption while in office. We’re also aware of the impact of harsh chemicals, and in our office only use cleaning products and employ cleaning practices that have lower environmental impacts than conventional products and practices.
We have a policy in place not to use plastics. We provide reusable glass bottles in our offices and continuously separate glass from other waste and encourage employees in their home offices to do the same.
We’ve dedicated ourselves to reducing the environmental impact of travel by using technology for collaboration and meetings when possible. We offer job-tickets for public transport and have a subsidized job-bike program for employees to encourage bike use.
By 2025, we’ve committed to ensuring 100% of our electricity comes from renewable sources. In doing so, we wish to reduce our electricity consumption for computers, data centers, and other digital infrastructure, by implementing green cloud computing. This includes reducing our server use and ensuring the power supply for our cloud services comes from renewable energy sources.
This even includes small actions, like encouraging our employees to delete old emails, which is a great practice in daily life outside of the office. Even spam emails are stored on the cloud, which uses a considerable amount of electricity. According to The Good Planet, nearly 107 billion spam emails circulated per day in 2019. If every person deleted just 10 of those emails, they could save 1,725,00 gigabytes of storage space and approximately 55.2 million kilowatts of power.
CoreMedia has a program in place to repurpose and recycle electronic waste. Decommissioned but usable electronics are regularly sold at a discount to employees for further use – a great secondhand option! Further options for avoiding electronic waste are constantly being examined and implemented. These include extending the use of the company devices for as long as possible and minimizing the number of different devices used for the same purpose as business activities allow.
And when it comes to our customers and suppliers, we always considers environmental factors when procuring goods and services. Any employee responsible for purchasing pays special attention to environmental compatibility. In case of doubt, more expensive goods may always be selected, provided they are more environmentally friendly.
We expect similar environmental standards from our customers and suppliers, and we're committed to complying with the environmental rules and standards of our customers.
We're proud to share responsibility for this planet and we're looking forward to reducing physical waste, lessening our carbon footprint, and advocating for sustainable technological innovation together in 2023.
