CTS Sustainability Policies
Together, CTS and Google are partnering to help customers create competitive advantage, operational efficiencies, and new ideas. Here you’ll find our sustainability policies.
Did you know that you can drop off your used batteries at our UK on-site locations to be recycled? Batteries that end up in landfill are a danger to the environment and can leak hazardous chemicals, running the risk of fire as well as contaminating soil and water. Recycling your batteries is the best way to protect the environment and give valuable materials such as zinc, lithium and nickel, used inside batteries, a new life in making other products. To help reduce battery waste, you can now bring your batteries to our dedicated battery collection boxes on-site for recycling.
Supplier name: Cloud Technology Solutions Ltd. (CTS & CloudM)
Publication date: 5th January 2023
At CTS, we’ve always pushed ourselves to do more for the world around us – it’s one of the reasons we have internal boards focused on DEI, Charity and Environmental issues. They act as our moral compass, always encouraging us to “do the right thing” in everything we do.
As such, we’re now creating our roadmap to net zero emissions by 2030.
As a starting point, we analysed our “baseline emissions”. This is a record of the greenhouse gases that we have produced in the past that will be used as a reference point against which emissions reduction can be measured in future.
For this we collected and analysed our data from the fiscal year 2021 – 2022 using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. However, we note that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, commuting and business travel had reduced, so we expect to see an increase the following year, but are putting measures in place to help reduce the overall emissions and work towards Net Zero.
We do not own any facilities, however, we have included improvements to be made in partnership with our building suppliers in our roadmap. With regards to vehicles, the company does not own, or use, any vehicles at this point.
We are accountable for energy in only one of our offices (our Manchester-based Headquarters). The combined emissions for electricity in this office over our Fiscal Year 2022 was 27,516.54 Co2 KG.
Purchased goods & services
We have 4 main types of suppliers;
For this analysis we used the data from our financial records to identify suppliers and the value spent, then we used the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) database to identify average emissions per type of supplier. The total emissions for our baseline year came to 814,595.80 Co2 Kg.
Transportation & distribution
We do not own the transportation or distribution of any goods sold. Most of our services are software and cloud infrastructure related and therefore have no requirement for transport. However, we do also work with Chrome suppliers to service our clients. Whilst we don’t have control over those suppliers processes, our roadmap includes an extension of procurement processes to include environmental and social impact.
General Waste
As a remote-first business, our employees work from a variety of locations, meaning that we are unable to calculate the general waste from each home location. On that basis, we’ve chosen to use the waste from our office locations as a baseline – (100l x 12)*52 = 62,400 litres.
As we have recycling systems in place in each location, we can assume that a minimum of 30% of our waste is recyclable.
Aside from general waste, we also produce electronic waste due to the requirement for sufficient desk setups for our employees. For we dispose of electronic waste in two ways; repurposing (reusing internally or donating to local facilities charities, schools, etc.), and recycling.
In FY22 we replaced 15% of our employees laptops, removing them from our stock, and removed 50% of our leavers’ laptops from our stock. From the proportion of removed laptops; 35% was repurposed and 65% (ie. 174kg) was recycled using ICT Reverse.
For repurposed and recycled equipment, the UK Government GHG Conversion Factors database considers the kg CO2 per unit to be 0.021.
| Total waste procured (kg) | Waste treatment | Proportion | Emission Factor per Government 2022 database | Total emissions (Co2 (Kg)) |
| 62,400 of general waste | Landfill | 70% (43,680kg) | 0.446 | 19,481 |
| Recycled | 30% (18,720kg) | 0.021 | 393.12 | |
| 174 of electronic waste |
Recycled | 100% (174kg) | 0.021 | 3.654 |
| Total Emissions: | 19,877.77 | |||
Business Travel
Our employees use three main modes of transport for business travel (train, plane, and car). We have used our internal data from our trainline business account, our travel consultants’ flight booking records and petrol expenses for car travel. The baseline emissions for these were 25,407.86 Co2(kg).
Commuting
Our employees work on a remote-first contract and therefore have no requirement to commute. However, some employees do choose to commute on a regular basis. In order to establish our baseline we have asked our employees to complete a survey of how often they travel for work, the distance and how they travel. The total emissions for employee commuting have been calculated to be 19,030.73 Co2(kg).
This resulted in total estimated emissions of 906,427 Co2(kg).
We began collecting data on carbon emissions in 2022, collating prior year data to create our baseline emissions footprint. We are using this year to improve our data collection processes in order to build on our reduction strategy. Therefore, we are unable to provide any current emissions report until this years’ data collection has been completed.
We aim to collect and analyse this data (April 2022 to March 2023) by May 2023 and subsequently update and publish this report.
We feel that we do not yet have sufficient data to provide realistic and achievable goals for our Net Zero target. However, we intend to analyse the next set of data in May 2023, at which point we will decide on our targets and provide updates in subsequent reports each year thereafter.
Whilst we don’t have ownership over any of our premises we’re committed to partnering with our providers to improve their impact. We’re currently working with Bruntwood, our headquarters’ property owner, on piloting IoT control kits to manage our space for energy consumption. Following our testing, the successful components of this pilot will be rolled out to the wider Bruntwood portfolio of offices.
We will be taking two approaches for reducing our emissions from energy consumption;
We will initially focus on part 1 in the near term, then work on the implementation of smart switches, optimised air conditioning settings and reduction of standby usage for our electrical goods.
Purchased goods & services
In January 2023 we will be launching our new procurement assessment, this includes social and environmental reviews and will be used to make decisions on suppliers of goods and services. In year 1, we commit to assessing our current service providers and hardware suppliers (laptops, monitors, mobile phones), as well as all suppliers procured during that year.
Transportation & distribution
Per the above explanation, we are also committing to assessing all hardware distributors used to supply our clients in year 1.
General Waste
Whilst general waste is not our largest source of emissions, it is also a challenge to reduce as materials used by our employees will continually depreciate. However, from FY24 we aim to increase the percentage of repurposed laptops to recycled by applying Chrome Flex OS and donating these to local schools.
Business Travel
Whilst we will continue to leverage our systems to allow people to collaborate remotely, we acknowledge we are unable to eradicate travel entirely. However, throughout 2023 we will be implementing policies to manage the use of business travel with the aim of cutting out all internal flights and prioritising the use of train travel for small to medium length journeys.
We understand that this approach does still create carbon emissions, and therefore commit to offsetting all business travel using Trees for Life, a rewilding project in the Highlands. In the longer term, we will consider the use of electric vehicles for business travel.
Commuting
Similarly to business travel, we are unable to eradicate all emissions for commutes, though we commit to continuing our remote-first policy to ensure no unnecessary commuting. Because of this, we plan to continue our Carbon Offset Commutes policy creating innovative ways of engaging our people in its use.
In the longer term, we plan on using the data collected from our commute submissions to create data-driven incentives to encourage the use of electric vehicles and public transport over the use of higher-emission vehicles.
This Carbon Reduction Plan has been completed in accordance with PPN 06/21 and associated guidance and reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans.
Emissions have been reported and recorded in accordance with the published reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans and the GHG Reporting Protocol corporate standard and uses the appropriate Government emission conversion factors for greenhouse gas company reporting.
Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions have been reported in accordance with SECR requirements, and the required subset of Scope 3 emissions have been reported in accordance with the published reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans and the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard.
This Carbon Reduction Plan has been reviewed and signed off by the board of directors.
Signed by Bill Bates, Director
Last updated: January 2023
