You may or may not know that adaptiVLE HQ is based at the Broughton Hall Business Park, a 900-year-old, 3,000-acre estate that, in recent years, has reinvented itself as a centre of sustainability and mindfulness. It incorporates a wellness centre, an onsite vegan restaurant and more trees than you can shake a stick at. They have undertaken a massive re-wilding project, with hundreds of thousands of new trees being planted on the estate in the past 18 months. You can read more about the estate’s activities here but how does adaptiVLE fit into this?
Up until recently, we’ve been happy to sit in our office, build cool digital stuff and go for lunchtime walks around the grounds of the estate. Sometimes, we even eat vegan food because we’re all about being down with the kids and their fads. Now, whether it’s by some sort of osmosis from being based here at Broughton or we’re starting to realise that the planet we’re leaving for our kids isn’t in the best condition, we’ve decided we need to up our environmental game.
So what’s the plan?
Our first port of call is to get our house in order. We recently achieved ISO 27001 in Information Security Management, which makes sense seeing as we create platforms that securely manage information.
Putting ourselves through the ISO accreditation gave us a bit of a taste for the process, so we looked at what else we could go for. We’re currently on with ISO9001 to show that we provide products and services that meet customer and regulatory requirements and we’ll talk about that in a different blog.
More pertinently, we’re also undertaking ISO14001 Environmental Management Systems. This will see us set up a framework for us to manage and improve our environmental impact going forward. So we will be looking at things like waste management (ditching those plastic bottles and cans of coke), energy usage in the office (stop the constant charging, using more natural light) and travelling (both commuting to work and meeting clients).
Secondly, we’ll be scrutinising our supply chain, which as a digital company, doesn’t involve a lot of physical commodities but we do use a heck of a lot of server space to provide our services which all contributes to our carbon footprint. Our current supplier already boasts green credentials but we’ll be doubling down on these to make sure it’s all legit.
Talking of carbon, the ultimate goal will be for us to become carbon negative. We’ve already worked out some rough calculations on the back of a chocolate cigarette packet (do they still exist?) and believe that by getting our hands dirty around Broughton, we can achieve this within the next year.
Kicking off
We’ve already started the ISO14001 process but our official kick-off on the adaptiVLE journey to sustainability begins next month as we launch our own No Impact Week.
The team is going to be undertaking a series of activities and challenges to see just how easy (or difficult) it is to reduce our environmental impact on a day-to-day basis. We’ll be chronicling our journey throughout the week via blogs, vlogs and social media, so keep an eye out for posts about overweight men in their 40s trying to save the planet whilst still delivering awesome e-learning.