How we offset our carbon emissions

At PDMS, we have always been advocates of environmental protection. 

For the last nine years, we have held the internationally recognised certification, ISO 14001, which we recently renewed through our certification body, Lloyds Register, for a further three years. This certification acts as external verification of our environmental management system, which in turns helps us identify, manage, monitor and control all our environmental issues in a ‘holistic’ manner.

Over the years, we have made several enhancements to the way we operate in order to improve our environmental performance, the most recent of which being the introduction of a carbon offsetting program.

Under the auspices of our ISO 14001 certification, we analyse all our activities to determine the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) that they produce, including:

• The electrical power consumed to operate both our offices and our data centres
• The fossil fuel consumed in heating our offices
• The amount of carbon generated by business travel, including flights.

This has been challenging at times to determine our impact, especially with most of our workforce operating from home for at least some of 2020/2021. However, at PDMS we always rise to the challenge and have been able to find a way to calculate our CO₂ emissions, in this far from straightforward situation.

Once we had measured the amount of emissions, the next step in our environmental journey was to offset this amount of carbon. Offsetting is the process of compensating for carbon that is generated, through improving environmental effects elsewhere in the world. 

Examples of offsetting include tree planting and supporting green technology projects. At PDMS, we decided the best way to achieve this was to purchase carbon credits that support clean energy projects, mainly in the UK, but also further afield.

Over the past two years we have offset more than 315 tonnes of carbon dioxide production, and whilst this sounds good and we are rightly proud of our efforts, this is just the start of the next phase of our environmental journey.

For PDMS, we hope the future provides many more opportunities for us to reduce the amount of carbon we are consuming, which in turn will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that we need to offset and ultimately provide benefit for the environment.