Becoming Carbon Neutral
“The science is clear: The world must act now if we’re going to avert the worst consequences of climate change.” — Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet
Over the last decade, sustainability has evolved from buzzword to core value among the best and brightest businesses around the world. This has been reinforced further in recent announcements from tech giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google emphasise who have all committed to putting no excess carbon into the atmosphere.
With that in mind, we sat down with our co-founder, Heather Staff to discuss the importance of becoming carbon neutral for our business, our clients, our employees and our future.
What does it mean to be carbon neutral and how have we achieved this?
As an organisation, we’re actually climate positive which means we’re more than offsetting the whole team’s entire carbon footprint. This covers any emissions from their time in the office, emissions from their home, personal travel, holidays, food, hobbies and more.
We were able to do this through the help of a company called Ecologi, a subscription service that allows you to plant trees based on the number of employees in your team. Every month you match a payment based on your total number of employees and they then plant your forest. So far we have 3,286 trees in our Street Group forest!
As a company that has a product that uses direct mail, we also wanted to ensure that our print supplier was also a carbon-neutral business. Their production facilities are solar-powered and they have installed low energy LED lighting throughout. They also use vegetable ink on their print presses and recycled paper for the letters.
How did you decide to start taking steps towards becoming a carbon-neutral company and why was it important to you?
It was something Tom (co-founder of Street Group) and I have always been conscious of, and whilst we always took small steps towards ‘doing our bit’, it didn’t quite feel like enough. Six months ago, two of the team suggested Ecologi.com, so after checking them out, we both agreed this encompassed everything we were looking for.
I really like the fact that somewhere in the world there is a Street Group forest, and that every team member can feel like they are doing their bit for the environment too. We also wanted to give our team the opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint even further by introducing the cycle to work scheme which we implemented at the same time.
We always hire for values first and I love that this initiative very much came from the team. Since day 1, we’ve encouraged our team to make positive change and done our best to provide the tools in order for them to do that. It’s one of the reasons every Street Group employee gets two volunteer days a year to use as they wish.
Does Street Group do anything else to help the environment?
I mentioned the cycle to work scheme earlier, and we actually have a large portion of the team who would (under non-COVID circumstances!) cycle into the office, so we made it a priority to add shower facilities to encourage that and make it comfortable for anyone wanting to participate in the scheme. As part of their welcome pack, every employee is given a metal water bottle on their first day to help cut down on single-use plastic bottles and we also recycle in the office. After consulting our teams, we’ve committed to offering continued remote working, providing more flexibility and cutting down their carbon footprint from commuting.
It’s also important we help our customers do their bit where possible. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Street Group, our flagship product, Spectre, provides Estate Agents with software enabling them to intelligently market to prospects via direct mail. This has revolutionised the way that Estate Agents approach their marketing, as the traditional method would be to drive around the area and ‘board spot’, to then post a letter through the door. We’ve eliminated this process through allowing our clients to send letters through the software, resulting in reduced carbon emissions.
Understandably, the argument that direct mail is counterproductive to reducing carbon emissions is something we’ve taken very seriously. That’s why we appointed a print supplier that is carbon neutral to ensure we’re living up to our own values as a business. All of their paper is from sustainable forests in the UK; they use solar panels to power the equipment and print using vegetable ink.
What are your plans for the future to continue to improve your carbon footprint?
We continue to be inspired by what other companies and individuals are doing so we’re always keeping an eye out for things we can adopt and learn from. As we continue to grow as a business, we’ll be setting some clear targets to measure our impact year on year.
We’ve got huge plans to grow, part of that will be moving to a new office so it’s important for me and our team that the next home for Street Group is as green and eco-friendly and possible. As I mentioned earlier, all of our team get two paid days volunteering a year, so maybe one day we can all use some time to go and plant some of these trees ourselves!
I’d really love to hear examples of what’s been working for you and your business, so please share any thoughts you have in the comments below, follow me on Twitter @hstaff1 or email me heather@street.co.uk
To find out more about life at Street Group, visit streetgroup.co.uk, our Glassdoor page, or visit our careers site.
