Sustainability starts at home – Nitor embarks on a sustainability journey

It is our intention to be a frontrunner in digital sustainable development. 

Over the past few years, sustainability has increased in importance for us. Last year, we shifted gears by establishing new Sustainability Engineer positions at Nitor. As  Sustainability Engineers, we use part of our working hours on sustainability work and promoting related activities together with Nitor’s employees and our partners. 

As one of the first concrete steps, Nitor signed up for the WWF Green Office, which is an environmental management system that helps workplaces reduce their carbon footprint and use natural resources sustainably.  

The path forward starts with self-assessment

This year for us is about self-assessment to see what is our current environmental footprint and where we can make the most significant impact. The Green Office environmental management system’s self-assessment helps us to find the right actions to minimise the effects our organisation has on the environment in every field of our operations. The WWF Green Office concept is a step towards becoming the kind of player we want to become. 

We’ve completed our analysis and went through our goals, metrics and planned actions with WWF. Having a Green Office certificate is one thing, but for us, the focus is naturally beyond the certificate. Our aim is to learn how to be a sustainable digital company and understand our negative (footprint) and positive impacts (handprint) and how to communicate those to our stakeholders. 

Our effort in implementing the Green Office program Nitor is focusing on the following key areas:

• Reducing our office carbon footprint and consumption of natural resources.

• Improving recycling facilities together with our landlord.

• Take sustainability into account more systematically in procurements.

• Develop a systematic way of corporate responsibility communications
  

Tangible efforts from energy consumption to sustainable code

In the IT sector, the biggest nut to crack is energy consumption and the lifecycle of electronic equipment like computers and phones. But looking at the hardware is not enough, we have to think about software too. For instance, a poorly implemented website with non-optimised images and a lot of videos increase energy consumption.

And what does sustainable development look like in terms of digital development?  At Nitor, we talk about sustainable code – writing code in a way that can be fixed by anyone,  anywhere, any time. It also includes topics like having serverless solutions and paying attention to whether the cloud providers we use have pledged to have net-zero carbon emissions.

We’ve been part of the UN Global Compact initiative since 2016 and our aim is to sign up for the Science-Based Targets initiative this year.

At Nitor our approach to sustainability comprises of three points of view: 

• How can we as a company be more responsible?

• How do we encourage a sustainable lifestyle for our employees in their daily work?

• How can we help our customers to be more sustainable?
  

It takes a village

As a company, we are very committed to sustainability, but overall the most challenging part about becoming more sustainable lies with changing how we think and act as individuals. 

The change is already here. Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility demands will increase in the near future: in all likelihood, next year will be a whole different ballpark. Already we’re seeing increasing demands from both investors as well as our clients. 

Becoming more sustainable is not an option anymore, it is a must. It is not a check-box exercise but a journey that is only the beginning for us.