This Earth Day, it’s time to shift our focus to our beautiful planet, and Esker is doing just that. Yesterday, today and for the future.
Earth Day was founded in 1970, and is an annual reminder to shift our focus to protecting the beautiful planet that we call home. It is a day to focus on educating others about environmental issues, to help raise awareness of pollution, renewable energy, and ways that people can take steps to be greener.
Earth Day – Invest in Our Planet: Positive-Sum Growth
This year, the theme of Earth Day is ‘Invest in our Planet’, and at Esker, we believe in doing just that. In fact, our aim is also to enable other organisations to do the same. Our customers, employees and partners share our convictions: a company’s development must have a beneficial impact on its entire ecosystem, society and the environment. That’s what we call positive-sum growth.
We believe that future business growth depends on environmental sustainability. Esker provides organisations with the tools to achieve real environmental results, such as:
- Less paper used in day-to-day activities, helping to save trees and reduce wasteful practices
- Less equipment needed to support manual operations, promoting long-term sustainability
- Less carbon by using cloud computing, which has shown to reduce emissions by up to 93%1
“Esker builds innovative and responsible solutions that have a positive impact on society and the people within it, and enable our customers to improve their own ESG performance.”
Jean-Michel Bérard, CEO | Esker
Reducing Esker’s Environmental Footprint
Esker is also strongly committed to reducing the environmental footprint our own business activities.
In 2018 in France, where our Lyon Head Office is based, Esker has established processes for determining its carbon emissions, and has since extended these to all of its worldwide subsidiaries.
You can read more about this in our Impact Report
Furthermore, in 2022, Esker was recognised by both EcoVadis and Gaïa Index for its CSR leadership.
Globally, we have many initiatives to reduce our environmental footprint.
- Replanting: a wide variety of tree species is one of the pillars of the strategy to remove carbon emissions from Earth’s atmosphere and protect biodiversity. With Esker’s support, Reforest’Action, a non-profit organisation engaging in a unique approach they call “crowdplanting”, more than 19,250 trees have been planted in India, Haiti and Tanzania since 2019.
- Data Centres & Energy Efficiency: Esker chooses environmentally responsible vendors whenever possible. For example, all new Esker customers are hosted by default on Microsoft Azure, which uses energy from renewable resources for a significant portion of its data centres, and bases its billing model on server resource usage, thereby encouraging moderation.
- Responsible Product Development: Esker ensures that its R&D teams are attentive to the digital footprint of software operations by building optimised services and energy efficiency into its solutions. Esker also conducts regular internal conferences on the challenges of digital sobriety, led by the founder of GreenIT.fr.
- Life Cycle of IT Equipment: Esker strives to extend the lifecycle of company-owned IT equipment and electronic devices as much as possible, through in-house maintenance, vendor support, or employee buy-back programmes in exchange for donations to charities of their choosing.
- Waste Recycling: We have waste recycling at our mail production facilities, and within all subsidiary offices. In addition, 100% of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) in recycled.
- Mobility & Business Travel: To encourage the use of low-carbon modes of transport, Esker offers a variety of incentives: electric car fleets, bike and scooter parking, mileage reimbursement for bicycle use, and public transport compensation.
You can read more about our environmental efforts on our website.
Locally, here in the UK, one of our current focuses is on our Esker goodies. We are trying to source sustainable giveaway items, such as our metal water bottles, recycled cork pens, compostable and all natural ingredient jellybean pouches, recycled paper notebooks and sustainable cotton canvas bags. We also have recycling points around our offices, and electric car charging points on-site.
We can, and must, all play our part to protect our beautiful world. It’s the only one we have. For us, and for future generations.
1 The carbon benefits of cloud computing: A study on the Microsoft Cloud in partnership with WSP. 2020. Microsoft.
