Our Commitment to Climate Action

May 2023

Polar Moment and the Latitude 91 group has a dedicated strategy that focuses on our environmental, social, and sustainability commitments. All this ensures we are being the best business we can be. This includes everything from reducing business travel to supporting local schools and charities. We are members of the SME Climate Hub, committed to halving our emissions before 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

SME Climate Hub

The SME Climate Hub provides tools and resources to enable SMEs to make a climate commitment, take action and measure their progress. Over 4,100 SMEs across 104 different countries have made the commitment to reach net zero by 2050, with key sectors including retail, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, technology. Learn more at: www.smeclimatehub.org.

Paul Deed is the Latitude 91 group’s sustainability and climate lead. Our estimated emissions for the last financial year were 23.1 tonnes of CO2e. Paul commented “This is a fifth of the average emissions for an IT industry company with a similar turnover. We are therefore already in pretty good shape, but we aren’t stopping there! The important thing is that we have a recognised and repeatable process to measure and report on going forward”.

What we are doing as part of our commitment to climate action:

Travel

We have set up a scheme for staff to lease electric cars. Staff are encouraged to use public transport when travelling on business. We have reduced business travel by more than 75% in the last five years, using teleconferencing and similar tools instead. Staff work principally from home and have done so for more than five years now.

Office

The office is equipped with movement sensors and lights are automatically switched off unless there are people in the office. We have operated a recycling scheme for over 10 years with numerous bins for this purpose around the office. Printing is discouraged and has reduced by more than 80% over the last five years.

Servers

Over the recent years, we have almost eliminated the need to run our own servers. Although data centres do consume significant amounts of energy, running systems within the cloud is still significantly more efficient than using dedicated servers.

Community

We provide support to the community in a variety of ways. For instance, we provide office space for one of the local schools to hold interviews and management planning days. We have provided work placements for local schools on a regular basis and for university students, both on a short-term (usually summer holidays) and long-term (one-year industrial placement) basis. We have employed several apprentices over the last 10 years and currently have one training within our development team.

Charity

We support a variety of charities, principally by donating for each customer representative who responds to our annual survey. This year we donated to the Basingstoke food bank – a charity working towards stopping hunger in our local area.

In conclusion

We are dedicated to reducing our carbon footprint and have implemented various strategies to achieve our environmental, social, and sustainability commitments. As members of the SME Climate Hub, we have committed to halving our emissions before 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050. Overall, we strive to set an excellent example for other companies to follow and are committed to sustainability.