On Thursday, 11th September, Devtank attended the Sustainability and CSR conference at the University of Derby, a fantastic event hosted by the East Midlands Chamber.
Keynote speakers included Dawn Whitemore, Professor Christopher Bussell, Becky Valentine, and Karen Holdsworth, each sharing insights into UK sustainability and net zero efforts or the CSR work their organisations have achieved.
Professor Christopher Bussell of the university shared updates on the new Cavendish Building, which is due to open on the 19th of September. Throughout the planning and construction, sustainability and carbon emissions were at the forefront of the build. Now fully built, it is equipped with solar panels for clean energy and the concrete used within the building was carefully selected based on its carbon footprint. Where they couldn’t improve the carbon emissions, they instead put together a carbon offsetting plan. This included many local projects like the regrowth of nature in the Derbyshire Peak District, a nature project in Australia, and a sustainable project in India, to name a few.
How Devtank could help: When the new Cavendish Building opens, our OpenSmartMonitors would be able to monitor the energy usage within the building and the environmental conditions, which is useful for ESG reporting.
Polina Baranova highlighted how SME’s are continually increasing their efforts when it comes to sustainability and carbon reduction. Devtank can see this from some of our customer base; take Luke Evans Bakery – a high-energy user who has been using our monitoring to track and improve what they are doing within their Derbyshire bakery. Polina went on to say that in comparison to the large corporates, SMEs are really pulling their weight on this topic. In Devtank’s experience, sometimes it’s about having a greater need to save costs, which means reducing energy consumption as one factor. This did link up with the conversations the team had on the stand, with quite a few visitors talking to us about utilising our OpenSmartMonitor solutions to monitor their energy usage for cost reduction.
“If you do it right, there’s a return on investment every day.” – Dawn Whitemore – President, East Midlands Chamber. This is a great statement and one that Devtank can get behind, from our own investments made and where we have seen clients invest in either HILTOP or OpenSmartMonitors.
What about climate change? Becky Valentine from Spenbeck gave a great talk on everything, detailing the risks, what sustainability and CSR are, and how we can do more than just save energy within our businesses. It’s not just about net zero, how we manage nature-based solutions to carbon offsetting and our employees’ mental health, for example. She highlighted these three areas for consideration right now:
- Green wishing – wishing for an unrealistic solution
- Green hushing – hiding the fact that something is not very eco-friendly or sustainable
- Green shifting – shifting the blame of poor sustainability onto someone else
When it comes to climate change, Becky highlighted the main signs of this, such as droughts, floods, rising temperatures, health decline, and reduced access to clean water.
James Cunningham from Geo Green Power backed up the reality of climate change and how, as a business, you can have a good impact. How? Through recycling, waste reduction, community projects, energy reduction, and improving the health of your people. It’s looking for the small improvements that can make a big difference. Any improvements to a business include increased productivity, higher staff retention, cost reduction, and improvements to reputation, all things which will lead to winning more customers and work.
CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility, is all to do with charitable work, social activities, environmental projects, and local support. The most favourable of this list is charitable work, as shown in Taran Rai of Epson. Karen Holdsworth of Samworth Brothers gave a great insight and overview into their own CSR activities. At Samworth Brothers, they have a charitable funding pot which sees 1% of their profits going towards funding of local charities and communities, whether for new football equipment for the local social club or a new green area for deprived areas. They also do a lot of charitable work through fun days out with the team, taking them out to build some of these green areas and projects. This gets the entire business physically involved with local projects.
Here at Devtank, we have started our CSR journey by supporting the local Derbyshire charity – Aquabox, with a percentage of our profits being donated annually. Aquabox are a clean water charity, manufacturing drinking water filtration systems and shipping out survival aid boxes all around the world to those most in need. Having completed a LEAN programme, they’ve got their manufacturing hub almost perfect when it comes to reducing waste and saving energy. We’re proud to support them.
Devtank can help organisations, large or small, with their ESG, sustainability initiatives, product quality and environmental compliance with the solutions that we offer. It was great to be part of a really vibrant day focused on businesses in the East Midlands and finding tangible ways to help us all improve.
