Bitesize: Meet the Green Team

Published on July 27, 2022 by Alex Eade

Who is the Green Team?

The Footprint Digital Green Team is currently made up of our Head of People, Charlotte; Partnership Development Manager, Kaya; and Business Development Manager, Bailey.

They created the working group to meet three aims:

- To facilitate the Sustainability Space for Footprinteers
- To ensure that talk led to action
- To simplify the barrier to entry

The focus of the working group

The United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as

“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

It’s not just about being eco-friendly, it’s about intergenerational justice and doing what we can today to help the people of tomorrow.

The Green Team is responsible for championing sustainability within Footprint Digital. To Charlotte, Bailey and Kaya, sustainability means being mindful of Footprint Digital’s impact on:

Our people: team, clients & partners
Our planet: our office, our homes and everywhere in between
Our place: the digital world and we want to make it greener

They want to weave long-term, sustainable strategies into the company that will be iterative and continuously improve all of our activity.

Goals of the Green Team

The goals of the Green Team have been split into those which can be achieved in the long and short term. Long term goals include:

Educational Training
Weaving sustainability in the fabric of Footprint Digital
Measuring our impact to align with our data-first approach
B Corp Accreditation
Need to create a transferable system that can fit with our 10 year goals

Short term goals, which the team have begun work on include:

Making more sustainable choices in and around the office
Creating a Library of resources in our CRM for the team
Information sharing amongst ourselves, our clients and partners
Holding ourselves accountable for our environmental impact
Keeping the conversation going

What is a B Corp?

Becoming a B Corp is one of our long term goals. ‘B Corp Certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials.’ (B Corp website).

Certified B Corporations and leaders of this emerging economy believe:

That we must be the change we seek in the world.
That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.

The process for becoming a B Corp can take years, so we are definitely in this for the long haul and want to make sustained and sustainable changes to every element of our business.

The plan moving forward is… DATA!

As lots of you will know, we are a data driven company. We make decisions based on data not gut feel, and our digital marketing materials encourage others to do the same. The types of data we are currently collecting to support our sustainability efforts are:

Electricity usage in the office
Our website’s digital carbon footprint

The Green Team will ensure that the information they share with the wider team will be reliable and data led.

They will gather feedback as to which sustainability initiatives are easily adoptable/implentable
They will use the data-led information they have to gather and measure the impact their changes are having
They’re currently looking into different ways to gather and record data on an individual and business level

What can we all be doing right now?

Deleting long email chains when replying in an email change
Changing your pension to an ethical pension
Remembering the impact of those 1-4 word emails (if it doesn’t need sending, don’t send it!)
Changing your laptop, CRM, mobile phone etc to Dark Mode
Turn off plugs at the weekend/ overnight if you don’t need them on

Things the Green Team have already put in place

Eco-kettle (replaces a very old kettle, the energy calculations of keeping the old kettle versus buying a new, energy efficient kettle were made before purchase)
Biodegradable tea bags
Sustainable toilet paper
Battery recycling pot
Better recycling system