INDUSTRY: Environmental Services

Energy efficiency

Environmental services firms, like many other organisations, can be energy-intensive, with heating and air conditioning, lighting and use of electronic devices contributing to significant energy usage, with a resulting impact on operational costs and greenhouse gas emissions. By assessing energy efficiency and business travel, powering offices from renewable energy sources and ensuring office spaces utilise sustainable design, energy footprints, greenhouse gas emissions, and operational costs can be drastically reduced.

Employee travel

Work within the environmental services sector often involves on-site visits, which can significantly contribute to an organisation’s scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Striving to reduce unnecessary business travel is vital, as well as the adoption of more sustainable transport methods. Hybrid working models, which have greatly increased in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic, can also help to reduce GHG emissions produced through employee commuting.

Delivering impactful services

The environmental services sector faces a critical question: how can it help clients avoid box ticking and help them to truly embed lasting change? While concerns around greenwashing are still commonplace, organisations in this sector can play a vital role in fostering genuine change within client organisations when it comes to sustainability practices and processes. Moving beyond transactional tasks and focusing on client education will help clients to exceed deliverables and guide them towards best practices that permeate the entire organisation in order to achieve lasting, meaningful impact.

Diversity and inclusion

While positive movements have been made with respect to gender representation in the Environmental Services sector, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse and disabled hiring remains poor. This is pervasive across firm size. Best practice diversity and inclusion initiatives can appear as ensuring equality in progression to prevent ‘glass ceilings’, the appointment of diverse leaders – as well as diversity throughout firms – and purposeful initiatives to hire from disadvantaged and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds, creating variety in talent pools in the sector.

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