Last year, at our flagship Tech Leaders’ Briefing conference, we launched the DPP Committed to Sustainability Programme. We showcased 7 companies, including our programme partner Atos, that had taken part in our programme trials and been awarded the Committed to Sustainability mark but, as yet, we hadn’t assessed ourselves.
The Committed to Sustainability mark is an indication of an organisation’s commitment to working towards environmental best practice, and recognition of the effort being taken to reduce its environmental impact. Although the DPP is not a global professional services provider or a specialist tech company like many of our members, as a fast growing, global business network, we too have a responsibility to address the climate change crisis by reducing our environmental impact.
With this in mind, we’ve assessed our activity and can reveal our own initial score of just 2 (out of 5) leaves. Clearly achieving a better score cannot, and will not, happen overnight. However, we’re confident that this score will help motivate us and others, to do more in order to obtain a better score.
So far we’ve focused on developing a meaningful environmental policy that includes challenging goals. The key requirements to achieve this were obtaining management buy-in, and identifying who was responsible for getting the resources assigned to help focus and deliver on the environmental policy objectives.
We’ve also built awareness of environmental issues within our team. A number of DPP team members have already signed up to attend the free training available from the Albert Scheme, which has helped them to understand and implement our environmental policy. This has led to increased self-awareness around changing behaviours and implementing more sustainable practices in our professional and, in some cases, personal lives!
Achieving a higher score requires investment in monitoring, measuring and reducing key environmental metrics such as energy, emissions and waste. The Committed to Sustainability Programme has enabled us to identify where the gaps in our own processes are and to start developing plans to better manage our impact.
If you take part in the programme we’ll never publish your organisation’s score without your permission, but it can be used in procurement submissions, in marketing, and, like ours, as a motivating force for further improvement.
DPP member company Piksel took part in our trial, and are happy for us to reveal their score and reasons for taking part. Piksel scored 2 leaves. Kristan Bullett, Managing Director², Media + Entertainment, says “Taking part in the DPP Committed to Sustainability Programme was an easy decision to make. Sustainability is a topic that is playing a very important role in our private lives right now and, as an influential industry, it makes complete sense to have a programme in place to give us the ability to systematically focus on reducing environmental impact. We’re confident that with the plans we’re developing, we can go on to measure and set performance improvement targets and this is something that we want to be very proud of. We’re already looking forward to resubmitting in order to achieve a higher score in the future.”
The new DPP environmental policy is available here. Over the course of the year, as we start measuring more of our impact, we will make more information about our progress available on this website, and would encourage others to do the same.
In the next few months we will publish an average industry score. We’ll hold sessions on sustainability at the SVG Chairman’s Forum at NAB, and in the DPP Theatre at the Media Production and Technology Show, as well as our own dedicated Sustainability event later in the year.