We believe in consumer power. Where you spend your money sends a message about the way you want businesses to behave and we know business can be a force for good.
Choosing responsible suppliers is important to us because we want to support brands who are also working hard to make positive changes in the world. How we use the things we buy or even choosing not to buy is just as important.
Sourcing providers is a constant work in progress as we learn about more brands offering ethical and sustainable options. For example, since day one we have used The Cooperative Bank, a renewable energy company to power our office (initially Ecotricity and now Octopus) and the Green Stationery Company. More recently we bought our business insurance with Evergreen Insurance who support wildlife and animal charities via clients’ policies.
For our IT equipment we choose energy efficient products. We build our PCs from individual components so that we get the specification we need and as a result our computers last longer whilst still working effectively. This means we can also replace, reuse and recycle individual parts when we need to. Similarly, we do not upgrade devices and equipment as soon as newest versions are available. Instead, we continue to use them until they are no longer suitable or working and at that point we donate for re-use or dispose of responsibly (in line with WEEE regulations).
All of our electrical equipment and lights are switched off when we aren't using them. Even though our electricity is from renewable sources, there's no need to waste it.
In the day-to-day running of our business travel is kept to a minimum and so is paper use, we have been able to pretty much cut out those things to provide our service. Sometimes its handy to write things down and so if we have notepads or notebooks they are made from scrap or recycled paper.
Most of our marketing is done online but if we need printed promotional materials we choose a supplier with environmentally friendly practices and products.
Online marketing services and other online tools also use energy and resources, so we’re as careful with these as we are with physical products. Waste and pollution is created by digital data and so you won’t find us posting lots of unnecessary videos (the biggest cause of pollution from online data) or creating resource heavy online content. This is a huge topic in itself and we wrote an article about it for Zero Waste Week 2019 if you’d like to find out more.
We are members of Ethical Consumer and their research on companies’ credentials is very useful in helping us decide who to buy from. Sometimes we don’t choose the company with the highest ethical scoring (for example mobile phone network) because we need excellent reliability or performance in order to deliver our services efficiently, reliably and cost effectively to our clients. But this is something we’re always keeping an eye on and if something better comes along, we switch.
We do love to share what we have learned and commit time to promoting ethical suppliers or more sustainable ways of working online and we’ll keep doing that – learning and adjusting.
We have an environmental policy which goes into further detail if you'd like to read more.
Last reviewed 16/02/2022
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