With the huge and sudden drop in both national and international travel scientists have reported reduced CO2 and nitrogen oxide emissions as well as ozone creation and particulate matter.
Whilst that is excellent news, there is clearly more to be done and crucially as society tries to find the new normal, it has given a lot of us time to think about the way we live and where we want to live our lives. For us here at Countrifi, the pandemic meant a surge of enquiries and requests for help. In the early days of the pandemic this meant a lot of video calls for us to offer up solutions, followed by delivering pre-configured equipment to customers doorsteps and then talking them through getting started back by video call. As the year carried on it was evident there was going to be no let up in enquiries and as we stepped into 2021 we have got more enquiries coming through than we’ve ever had.
What does this all have to do with sustainability I hear you ask? Well, in 90 percent of enquiries from our customer it’s evident that some sort of equipment is going to be required to resolve their issue. We have ordered hundreds of boxes of equipment which has then gone on to be installed at customer premises and all of that involves an environmental impact. We therefore started to look at our supply chain, the brands and solutions we used, even down to the delivery mechanisms they have in place. We have introduced solar powered versions of some of our security solutions and I’m pleased to say we have several of these now deployed with customers. It’s a great solution for 2 key reasons; the customer doesn’t need to worry about the cost of an electrician running additional cabling around their property and we are using a 100% renewable energy source.
We are now in talks with a number of our suppliers around their product packaging to see if we can push them to reduce the amount of soft plastic (mostly not recyclable) included with their products. Not only is it the individual product packaging we want to address, but also delivery packaging such as bubble wrap and Sellotape. We will recycle every piece of waste we can (as we do at home) but we still find there is an alarming amount of unnecessary packaging involved. Not satisfied with this, we are looking at ways we can actively offset our carbon footprint through schemes such as tree planting, further solar power and electric or hybrid vehicles.
Whilst we are pleased with the progress we are making, we are aware there is a lot more we can do and we will continue to push to do more and adhere to the 3 R guidance – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and wherever we can use local suppliers and resources. If you’ve got any suggestions we’d be happy to hear them so please feel free to get in touch.
