Demonstrating Low Carbon Innovation
Low carbon behaviour is a significant part of Attenda's social responsibility charter, so in 2008 we set out to achieve CarbonNeutral office status, as the first step. Now in 2010 we are fully accredited with CarbonNeutral company status, reflecting the extent of our ongoing initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint.
Preparation for CarbonNeutral® office status commenced in 2008, driven by the Executive Team, who were keen to do something to reduce the company's carbon emissions and lessen our impact on the environment, as an integral part of the company's social responsibility charter.
In order to achieve a carbon neutral position, we worked with The CarbonNeutral Company to draw up a precise carbon footprint of all our office activities, before embarking upon a number of offsetting initiatives to reduce this amount to net zero. Independent verification by the ECCM then entitled eligibility for the award of the CarbonNeutral office brand mark.
As part of this project, we measured our energy use, waste production and travel emissions and implemented a number of ongoing internal activities to reduce CO2 production further. In 2008, we produced just under 2,000 metric tonnes of CO2, most of which relates to staff commuting, business travel and providing power for the office.
We have developed and expanded a comprehensive office based recycling programme, through which over 95% of our office waste is recycled rather than being sent to landfill. Another initiative has been to supplement existing lighting infrastructure and electricity saving devices with more energy efficient lighting fixtures and bulbs," comments John Godwin, Head of Compliance and Business Services.
Flexible working practices have been implemented, allowing staff to work from home, thereby reducing commuting derived emissions and actively encouraging the use of public transport where practical, and car sharing for business journeys. Additionally, procurement processes have been revised, encouraging suppliers to become carbon neutral and favouring those with an active environmental programme.
We have offset the remaining emissions through The CarbonNeutral Company, for every 1 tonne of CO2 that needs to be neutralised, we have arranged for 1 tonne of CO2 to be saved somewhere else in the world, through an offsetting project which has been verified to international standards.
In addition to the in-house initiatives, we have also introduced a unique programme for our clients - the CarbonNeutral Attenda hosting programme - which enables Clients to offset the footprint of their infrastructure hosted within the Attenda data centres. We are encouraged by the initial take up that we have had to this Client-facing programme, to date Clients that have signed up to the programme include: Ark Workplace Risk, easyCar.com, Datamonitor, Fulham Football Club, iWantGreatCare.org, Oxford Analytica, TM Group and White Stuff and we expect more Clients to opt in during 2010. In partnership with The CarbonNeutral Company, a world-leading carbon offset and management business, the CarbonNeutral Attenda hosting programme provides a robust solution and cost effective for our Clients, and this can be readily integrated with your own environmental policy and programmes.
There is no margin or benefit to Attenda in the scheme, the cost is based upon a calculation of your server power consumption @30% utilisation, factored to account for data centre cooling, plus the inclusion of a small allocation for Attenda core infrastructure services. As an example, the cost for a 10-server HP DL380 environment equates to an annual offset cost of £380.25, or £38.25 per server. The annual offset cost is added into your quarterly recurring fees, so there is no additional administrative overhead.
In summary, the CarbonNeutral Attenda hosting programme readily integrates with your existing environmental programmes and provides a low cost, easy and efficient way to gain CarbonNeutral hosting for your infrastructure hosted within Attenda's data centres. Our ongoing carbon neutral commitment will focus on further reducing the footprint through in-house initiatives and encouraging more of our clients to utilise our more energy efficient Cloud services, Attenda RTI, and contract into the CarbonNeutral Attenda hosting programme. We are continuing to invest in technology advances to reduce emissions through virtualisation, cloud services, more efficient computing resources and shared services. As our internal reductions take effect and our total CO2 emissions reduce, we will need to purchase less carbon credits to ensure that we maintain net zero CO2 emissions.