How to help meet your CSR targets through sustainable supply chain services

Sustainability is high on most corporate agendas. Previously, sustainability was viewed as corporate philanthropy: a 'nice to have' that was great for marketing but had little impact on the overall corporate strategy. This perspective has changed significantly in recent years, as business leaders respond to changing consumer habits which demand sustainable business practices and can offer a considerable competitive edge.

Defining how a business can meet the vast challenge of sustainability can be overwhelming. Sustainability is not something that can be addressed in isolation, but rather something that can be improved right across the business and in each of its activities. Businesses often wonder where to begin in creating positive change.

Sustainable IT

One such area that can quickly help businesses establish better sustainable practices is in IT. IT contributes massively to global GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions - with 50% of GHG emissions attributed to workspace inefficiency, and 34% related to pollution from compute devices in the UK - but equally it can also be used to help improve sustainability and reduce the carbon footprint by facilitating a more flexible work environment.

This can be achieved in four key areas:

• Devices- Simply selecting the right devices for your organisation can improve sustainability. Energy-efficient endpoint devices can reduce GHG emissions and save you money. With the help of partners, we can deliver low-power devices that are more cost-effective and longer lasting, reducing the initial investment in hardware, increasing lifespan, and extending device refresh cycles.
• Agile Workspaces- Adopting a single, unified, consumer-like experience which empowers your people to work from anywhere, on any device, with secure single-sign on to access all their apps and data reduces the need for business travel and cuts your overall fuel emissions.
• Data centre efficiency- Inefficient data centres are a major contributor to GHG emissions. By moving to renewable, cloud-based solutions and addressing power consumption, cooling and space, on-site or in partnership with your chosen cloud provider, you can and help reduce your organisation's carbon footprint.
• Waste management and recycling- By extending device refresh cycles and moving desktops to the cloud, you can further reduce your carbon footprint. When the time finally comes to refresh, IT recycling and environmental services can help monitor and minimise waste and save on capital expenditure though on-selling materials and refurbishing IT.

Outsourcing Sustainability

By outsourcing IT processes such as cloud hosting, end user compute (EUC), and device management to a solutions provider such as SCC, you can improve your sustainability and leverage your provider's commitment to long-term sustainability within your own sustainability programme. However, cloud computing is no silver bullet to better sustainability.

The only way of removing 100% of GHG emissions is to remove a workload completely. Cloud computing can support greener IT operations but, ultimately, organisations need to approach suitability as a holistic and evolutionary process, in partnership with their IT service providers.

By maximising energy-saving opportunities using the as-a-service approach, you can ensure best practices in IT efficiency across:

• Energy efficiency- Delivering an optimum level of power, storage, and connectivity with the lowest input of energy possible.
• Equipment efficiency- Maximising IT processing power and storage capabilities with fewer IT assets.
• Resource efficiency- Engineering products to work efficiently within data centres, while requiring the least amount of support equipment and staff for power conversion, cooling, and resiliency.
• Software efficiency- Using AI and ML to simplify IT operations by predicting and preventing problems across the infrastructure stack and making decisions that optimise application performance and resource planning.

Our Supply Chain

SCC's Supply Chain division employs policies and processes designed to improve customer asset deployment efficiencies whilst also offsetting carbon emissions to help reach sustainability targets.

Bonded Storage

SCC's secure storage facility will utilise customer led roll out schedules to deliver assets to pre-defined locations. This will enable business continuity and deployment fluidity whilst also enabling SCC the ability to maximise courier resources and help minimise vehicle carbon emissions.

Pre-provisioning

SCC's configuration centre can help reduce and consolidate packaging prior to delivery to customer site. This will enable quicker unpacking and deployment times whilst also offering the customer carbon emission offsetting. Ref. SCC's 'The Gold Standard Foundation'.

Delivery

With careful planning, SCC will maximise vehicle utilisation to help reduce carbon emissions. To minimise customer workload and waste production, SCC can remove packaging whilst onsite, taking ownership of the waste and recycling it on behalf of the customer.

Recycling

SCC's £10 million investment enables comprehensive recycling services which forces all materials generated being passed for further reprocessing by SCC's network of approved reprocessors. Cardboard is commonly recycled back into packaging materials, newspapers, and magazines. Hazardous waste is commonly reprocessed back into the automotive industry. Non ferrous and precious metals are re-used back into electrical components Metals are smelted down back into raw materials used in the construction industry.

Building a sustainable IT ecosystem

SCC is internationally accredited to ISO14001 and OHSAS 18001 standards and in 2005 became the first to use an Environmental Management System (EMS) which is certified by Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance (LRQA). Its data centres are CarbonZero, accredited by co2balance, a leading carbon management company which helps businesses offset their carbon footprint.

Through implementing sustainable supply chain services, such as IT recycling, SCC's customers have achieved:

• Energy savings equivalent to the annual energy supply of 4.5k homes.
• Carbon emission reductions equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 3.5k cars.
• The equivalent carbon offset of planting 77k trees.
• A reduction of 2.722 m3 of landfill, saving £250k in landfill tax.

IT recycling services can guarantee 0% landfill from end-of-life IT, whilst extending the life of assets through refurbishment, or even creating a new revenue stream by remarketing redundant IT in the second user market.

By bringing together the four key areas of a sustainable workplace, you can build a sustainable ecosystem that reduces your carbon footprint, simplifies digital transformation, crates energy efficiencies, extends the device lifecycle, and meets budget requirements.

Click here to find out how SCC's end-to-end Lifecycle services have typically minimised costs and maximised performance improvement.

We're pleased to announce that SCC is officially part of the United Nations Global Compact - the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative. The UN Global Compact aims to mobilise a global movement of sustainable companies and stakeholders to create the world we want.

We support the ten principles of the Global Compact with respect to human rights, labour, environment, and anti-corruption and look forward to continuing implementing these in our organisation as well as promoting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's) to the businesses and Non-Government Organisations that we work with globally.

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