Our sustainability policy

Photo: D Sharon Pruitt

We last updated this sustainability policy on 30 November 2009. If you’d like to know more about anything here, just get in touch.

Contents

Use the links below to skip to different sections.

Background

So what does sustainability mean for Polon?

1. What do we mean by sustainability?
2. How can we be more sustainable?

Actions

We can act in lots of ways to make Polon a more sustainable business — some of the most important ones are:

1. Travelling efficiently on public transport
2. Conserving energy
3. Investing in renewable energy
4. Using sustainable suppliers
5. Reducing, reusing and recycling
6. Promoting ethical practices and helping others
7. Thinking about our future

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What do we mean by sustainability?

The Brundtland Report, produced in 1987 by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, defined sustainable development as: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. These needs come into three broad categories: economic, social and environmental. If we are to be sustainable, we must keep all three in harmony. So sound financial management is as much as part of sustainability as protecting the environment.

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How can we be more sustainable?

We help clients put their sustainable activities into words — from encouraging people to recycle their old mobile phones to lobbying for better high speed rail links in the UK. So this is our biggest opportunity to make a difference. And we often learn things from our clients that we can apply to our business. We don’t believe in spreading greenwash so we try to set a good example by making sustainable choices in our own business.

Of course, that’s easier said than done because doing business offers us lots of choices. But one of the options is normally more sustainable than the others. We try to choose that option wherever we can. We don’t pretend that we have all the answers, but we’re trying hard to be responsible. This policy reflects our achievements, and also our ambitions. So we’ll be updating it regularly as we refine our ideas and learn more about how to be more sustainable.

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Travel

We don’t fly on business. Our clients are based in the UK, and although some of them have offices or clients of their own overseas, there's not much that can’t be done by videoconference, by phone or over email.

Within the UK, we travel to meetings by public transport whenever possible (we’ve gone to one meeting by car since 2005). So if you’re based anywhere near a train station or a bus stop, we’re more than happy to come and meet you to talk about writing. Then again, if you’re more of an email person, we can work that way too. Since our writers are home-based we don’t have a commuting footprint. And we invest in technology that makes our business portable, so even if we’re at the opposite end of the country from a client, we can easily work together or hold a meeting.

These policies make a real difference to our carbon footprint. Suppose one person needs to travel from London to Birmingham for a meeting. This is just over 100 miles away, so the carbon dioxide emissions for the return journey could be:

• Aeroplane 55kg
• Small Car 41kg
• Train 19kg
• Video-conference 0kg

(Source: transportdirect.info)

Taking the train to this meeting cuts out 65% of the carbon emissions of the equivalent flight. And when we replace international journeys with a video-conference, the savings are even greater. Over the last two years, we estimate that we’ve saved 1.75 tonnes of carbon emissions by taking the train instead of driving and by using phone and video-conferencing instead of flying. To put this in context, our total carbon footprint from business travel is only 0.5 tonnes per year.

If we use public transport and ask for better services when we’re not satisfied, helps to create a more effective public transport system. This creates better conditions for everyone, and promotes sustainable economic growth.

It also works out cheaper for us. If we add up all the financial costs of owning a car over its lifetime — purchase price, finance costs, insurance, MOTs, repairs, road tax, breakdown cover, petrol, parking charges — and divide this by the number of miles we might expect to drive on business then we estimate a car would have cost us 50–80p per mile in 2008, depending on which model we drove. On the other hand, a train journey of 140 miles costs just 22p per mile.

Cutting back on commuting saves plenty of carbon emissions too. Commuting four miles to work in an average sized petrol car during the rush hour every day produces approximately 850kg of CO2 per year. And even taking the London Underground over the same distance produces roughly 160kg per year per person. [Source: Potter, Stephen (2004): Transport Energy and Emissions: Urban Public Transport, Chapter 13].

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Energy

We could have rented our very own Polon offices, providing a base for our writers. But we’ve saved land and energy by choosing instead to create a virtual office — an office management company deals with our mail and any registered office business, and our writers work from the comfort of their own homes. Lots of companies are based at the same virtual office as us, meaning that the ecological footprint of their building is shared between all of them. We’d like to quantify the benefits of this approach — so we’ve asked how much energy and land our virtual office uses on our behalf, asked about their approach to sustainability, and we’re exploring the effect that working from home has on the energy consumption of our writers.

We encourage our writers to conserve energy in the same way as you do at home — by using energy-efficient heating systems and appliances, by switching off electrical items when they’re not in use and by conserving resources like paper and water.

As a team of freelancers working out of a virtual office, we don’t have much in the way of gas or electricity bills. But we know that the energy we use while working at home is important too. We practise energy saving through wearing warm jumpers on cold days, turning off our computers and unplugging mobile phone chargers when they’re not in use, and making sure that we don’t overfill the kettle when making all those cups of tea that keep the creative juices flowing.

At the home offices where our permanent staff are based, we buy 100% renewable electricity from Good Energy. You can read more about the differences between companies offering green tariffs at Green Electricity Marketplace.

To reduce our energy consumption we:

• Use natural light and ventilation in our home offices
• Use low energy light fittings
• Use an electricity monitor to track how much power we use
  
• Turn off electrical equipment when not in use
• Measure our carbon footprint
• Find ways to reduce our footprint by 10% a year

For our year ended 31 July 2009, we have estimated our carbon footprint at 1.05 tonnes. More information about how we calculated this can be found here.

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Renewable energy

Small energy saving measures do add up, but we wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ve invested some of Polon’s profits in Triodos Renewables, a company which recently helped launch the UK’s first tidal power scheme off the coast of Northern Ireland. It’s a small step but we felt that it was important to put our money where our mouth was on renewable energy.

Triodos won 'Sustainable Bank of the Year 2009' at the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards.

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Resources

Most offices have — or should have — recycling schemes and measures to reduce waste and water use. Even though we don’t have an office building to look after, we do recycle paper and ink cartridges and we try not to print out work unless we need to. Our writers drink tap water, make coffee in mugs rather than plastic cups and compost their food waste.

In the medium term, we’d like to be more responsible about the resources we use. To us, this means making sure we don’t deplete exhaustible resources — for example, by using renewable electricity, buying second-hand desks and ensuring we reuse or recycle everything we buy. It also means using only our share of resources, so that we leave enough for everyone else — in particular, reducing our carbon footprint to a globally sustainable level.

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Suppliers

To make Polon a viable, sustainable business we need good suppliers. We need efficient banking, reliable IT, creative freelancers and secure web hosting, to name a few. We need to get good value for money. But we also need to consider their sustainability credentials, to ask ourselves what we’re buying, why we’re buying it and whether there’s a more sustainable option. We’re currently evaluating our suppliers to make sure they’re as sustainable as they can be. We’ll update this policy as we find out more.

Technology

We’ve now examined our electronic equipment — chiefly Macs and iPhones. We've read Apple's own statement about the sustainability of these tools, as well as Greenpeace's reports on the improvements that Apple are making in this area. Apple score well on eliminating PVC and brominated flame retardants (BFRs), but not so well on using recycled materials and reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions. We’re happy with the technology we use because we think it saves us time — and therefore energy, but we'd like to look carefully at our next purchase.

Office supplies and stationery

We get most of our office supplies from Commercial Group. Commercial takes a real stand with its corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy. They’ve taken a long, hard look at their own supply chain and are working to reduce their carbon footprint from distribution and waste in particular. We’re impressed with their achievements, and we like the way they put this message at the heart of what they do, encouraging employee involvement and bringing their customers on board too.

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Ethics

We won’t take on as clients or buy from governments or businesses which fail to uphold basic human rights or businesses with links to an oppressive regime. And we won't do business with companies involved in:

• manufacturing or transferring armaments to oppressive regimes
• manufacturing equipment used for torture or the violation of human rights
• developing genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
• animal testing of cosmetic or household products or ingredients
• intensive farming methods
• blood sports that use animals or birds to catch, fight or kill each other
• the fur trade.

We’ll seek to support clients and suppliers who take a responsible position on fair trade and labour rights in their own operations and through their supply chains in developing countries.

We won’t support:

• irresponsible marketing practices in developing countries
• tobacco product manufacture
• currency speculation

We’ll seek to support charities and organisations involved in the social enterprise sector.

As we grow, we’d like to put something back into the community through our writing — helping organisations we have a connection with. In fact, this is something we’ve done right from the start. We took our first step towards this at the outset of Polon — helping Worcester Snoezelen, a small charity for people with sensory and learning disabilities, set up their website, and find a voice to talk about their work.

Supporting other organisations who work in the voluntary sector is something we’d like to do more of — perhaps seeking out more work with charities we feel strongly about, or each writer helping an organisation that’s a key part of their local community. Right now we're working with an organisation called Media Trust, offering our services to charities in need of copywriting skills. 

We pay our employees and suppliers fairly and promptly. In particular, when we work with new writers, we will pay them an agreed fair rate for their time and give them feedback on their work.

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Our future

Where do we go from here? We’ve got lots of ideas for making progress and measuring how we’re doing. We could look at letting our clients know about the footprint that our work for them leaves behind. Or we could calculate the carbon footprint for each business journey we take to meet with them and show this on our invoices. This would inform clients about the (relatively low) environmental cost of our work, and they would have the opportunity to consider offsetting the resulting CO2.

We need to think about where we draw the boundaries when calculating our own footprint — do we include client work as part of our footprint or part of the client’s? What happens if we have a day when we work on developing Polon and don’t do any client work? Should we include the footprint of services and products we buy as well as what we produce ourselves? And by how much should we be aiming to reduce our footprint — what’s a fully sustainable level for a business like ours?

We know that there are more areas in which we could put ourselves under the microscope — we could measure our water consumption, petition our writers to save energy in other ways, cut back on travel altogether or ask the directors to move to live in smaller houses. Some of these might be practical for us soon and we’d like to look into them. But even we accept that we can’t change the world on our own. There are still more questions than answers, but at least we’re making progress.

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Working with Polon means we know our clients’ copy is in good hands. They really get inside the brief and deliver us consistently good writing.

Ruth Barton, Partner, Hyper Happen