Environmental responsibility is at the heart of what we do, including the commitment to practice what we preach, in both the products we create and how we operate. If we can create products that offer a net benefit to society and help inspire and support others to do likewise, we will have achieved our goals.
We do however try to avoid using the term ‘sustainability’: too often it is a piece of meaningless self-justification coined to provide comfort from largely meaningless gestures towards an ill-defined future. The only sustainability metric that ultimately matters is our ability as a society to live in a long-term dynamic balance with the planet that sustains us. To get to there from the now we need to take radical action to cut our impact and, as action then enables further action, follow continually moving goalposts until we reach that essential global homeostasis.
Experience
Intelligent Reality is based in the Scottish Highlands and in Germany, and we work closely with our partners at udu in the USA. Our team has decades of professional experience in ecological and climate change projects (including founding a Climate Change awareness non-profit) and the heart of our vision is our BlueGlobe platform and its goal of giving people, communities, enterprises and governments the tools to enable, support and predict their understanding, modelling and forecasting of what they can be doing in our transition to a post-carbon economy.
Progress
As part of our long-standing commitment to reducing the need to travel, one of our founders has established an award-winning community fibre broadband project, now serving the entire local area at gigabit+ speeds (compared to <1Mb/s before), significantly reducing the need for travel. This has been critical for both our business and the local community during Covid-19 lockdown.
As a team, we fully embrace hybrid working, with remote working being the norm, meeting up at regular intervals for the creative interaction that is still best carried out face to face.
Our operational environmental impact is mitigated through use of on-site renewable energy and low energy appliances: we are based in an eco-renovated historic building, which won UK renovation of the year in 2014 and, when private travel is necessary, we already use BEV (Battery Electric Vehicles). Our extensive use of Cloud services also helps reduces carbon footprint from computer use (by up to 87% — AWS figures).
Operationally, our own plan is to be auditably carbon-negative by 2025 and we are using our own tools to track this. We monitor our operational and personal carbon footprints and have seen the latter fall from approximately 30 tonnes/CO2 in 2011 to 8 tonnes in 2020.