Investors may look for companies to be more sustainable; but sustainability is about everyone, and there are lots of things that you can do – and off-setting is the easy option, the 105th OSPAs thought leadership webinar heard this afternoon.
Two of the panellists were from UK contract guarding: Samantha Lang, Risk Manager in charge of risk and compliance at SecuriGroup, based in Glasgow; and in London, Abbey Petkar, pictured, Managing Director at Magenta Security Services. Also speaking from the US was Catherine Sheehy, Global Lead of Sustainability Partnerships at UL Retail and Consumer Products, a US-based certification and testing company.
As Samantha and Abbey set out, anyone can make a difference, and the impact is on the bottom line – in savings. Abbey gave the idea of offering security officers work that’s closer to their home, so that they can cycle to work rather than going by car or public transport – and employers can sign up to schemes towards staff buying bicycles. Samantha gave the case of security officers on patrol for a client switching off screens after the working day, which saved the client £26,000 in energy in a year.
Catherine Sheehy began with the point that investors are looking for companies to disclose data on how they are progressing towards environmental and sustainable goals. Sustainability, as she said, is not only a question for security companies themselves, but for their customers (and their investors, putting pressure on them to report progress).
Abbey Petkar began by saying: “My view is that sustainability is everyone’s responsibility, be it the security officer, manager or the owner of the business.” As something of a pioneer in talking about sustainability in UK private security – and action, Magenta gaining the ISO 14001 international standard – he gets asked a lot about how to do sustainability (and, he added, he gives his advice free). He disagrees that on cost or other grounds that it’s something a company, especially a small company, cannot get involved in, even though the panel acknowledged that there can be a threshold of an initial cost of investment – whether in solar panels, or a more energy-efficient fleet of vehicles, or going paperless in the office. It doesn’t matter how big or small are the things you do, they all make a difference, was Abbey’s point, making the case for the three Rs – re-use, reduce, and recycle.
It has to be done ‘top down’, he went on, for the understanding and setting of goals to reduce impact on the environment. He described his firm’s change in vehicles (a large cause of environmental impact by guarding firms). Magenta tried over several years to find battery-powered cars that had less environmental impact than (petrol or diesel) vehicles, and couldn’t find anything. Instead, the firm looked at engine size and overall size of vehicle; and instead of changing vehicles every three years, waited five years, until the market did offer electric cars. Magenta has just received its first electric vehicles. Securigroup likewise is going to an all-electric fleet by 2025.
As for solar panels, Abbey said that Magenta has reduced energy consumption by 75 per cent. He acknowledged the initial cost of solar panels; but there comes a refund and going solar helps with corporate social responsibility (CSR): ‘I think these things are linked,” he said. “It’s all about educating the staff, making sure that people understand what your goals are and how you are going to achieve them,” he summed up.
Besides CSR, Samantha Lang said that ’employees expect us to take an environmental responsibility seriously’; as do clients. As we recover from the coronavirus pandemic, climate change will return to the top of the agenda globally, she added. Securigroup has certified to the ISO 14001 standard; but that’s just the beginning, she said, towards becoming a carbon net-zero company. Examples of work she gave are energy-efficient lighting, and heating; tree planting; and digitalising processes to use less paper. She stressed also your supply chain, and making sure that it’s in line with your sustainable goals. Securigroup is to exhibit at the Cop26 conference in Glasgow.
Then came questions put to the panel by webinar chair Prof Martin Gill; first, any commercial barrier to work on sustainability; is the greater priority getting contract work, in a sector with low margins? ‘We hear that a lot,’ Catherine Sheehy of UL replied, agreeing that there may be an initial cash-flow investment (of thousands of pounds) to make before the benefit will show. To really tackle sustainability, she went on, you have to find operational efficiencies, and do sustainability in cost-effective ways – that allow you to differentiate yourself in the market.
Abbey, too, said he hears the cost argument of doing sustainability a lot from others. He agreed that there’s an investment to make at the outset; but then costs reduce over time. Being more environmentally is driven by customers, he said, wanting more environmentally-friendly suppliers. That was raising the question of whether any company or a security company can afford not to work on sustainability – given that, as Catherine Sheehy pointed out later, millennials and Generation X and Z are showing a preference for those companies that do sustainability. Start somewhere, was Samantha Lang’s advice; every small act makes a difference; if you cannot change your entire lighting system, as you change a light bulb, fit a new energy-efficient bulb.
Naturally the pandemic and lockdowns cropped up, that the panel saw as part of the case for acting responsibly over sustainability. Catherine Sheehy spoke of companies that performed well in terms of CSR before the pandemic having performed well in the market, being more resilient to disruptions, whether covid or climate change or terrorism. “It’s a mindset,” Abbey Petkar said, “that we are looking to achieve. Once we achieve that, it will continue.”
As that remark implied, when asked by Martin Gill whether the security industry has grasped sustainability, Samantha Lang doubted it. That said, Abbey Petkar felt that progress is achievable – not only are customers pushing for it, there’s an individual responsibility on all of us, to do what we need to do, he said.
Next webinar
The next OSPAs webinar is on Thursday afternoon, a return to a past subject – convergence: ‘is the problem the people rather than the technology’? UK speakers on the panel are Emma Boakes, a PhD Research Student at the University of Portsmouth; and from corporate security, Dawn Holmes, Global Physical Security and Technology Specialist at GKN Automotive. You can sign up to listen for free at https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/. There you can also view past webinars. Next Tuesday’s webinar is another fresh look at a topic – sexism in the security industry, where a UK speaker is the former senior Nottinghamshire Police woman Susannah Fish OBE QPM, now a consultant and a governor at Nottingham Trent University.
