Krome join the Tech Zero Taskforce to help fight the climate crisis.

As a climate-conscious organisation, we are committed to making our operations more energy-efficient, working to achieve net-zero carbon emissions ahead of the 2050 target.

At Krome Technologies we understand that doing business sustainably is critical for everyone’s future and that collectively it is vital that we act now, and that’s why we have joined the Tech Zero taskforce, a group of innovative UK technology companies that are taking bold action to fight the climate crisis.

We’ve made a commitment to ensure sustainability is at the core of our operations, we plan to halve our emissions before 2035, achieving net-zero emissions ahead of the UK’s 2050 target, and we are committed to disclosing our progress annually.

But what exactly does Net Zero mean? Net-zero is a state where a company’s activities result in no net impact on the climate from greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions can be categorised into three areas: scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

• Scope 1 covers our direct emissions. These emissions come from things we own or can control, such as our office gas boilers and company vehicles.
• Scope 2 covers our indirect emissions. These come from the production of any electricity, heat or energy that we buy.
• Scope 3 covers all other indirect emissions in our company’s supply chain. For tech companies, around 80% of emissions will fall into scope 3. These include the goods or services that we buy, including our technology vendor partners and our data centre partner, any business travel including our employees’ commutes.

We are currently evaluating our existing emissions position and are planning our reduction strategy accordingly.

Things we are already doing to reduce our emissions:

• In 2019 we replaced all of our desktop PC’s with laptops and new monitors, saving a third in power consumption across our devices.
• In March 2020 we switched to a renewable energy supplier.
• In 2021 we upgraded our core server and storage technology to newer, more energy-efficient solutions. The upgrade of the old storage arrays in our secondary data centre reduced the power consumption by 23%. We are currently carrying out a similar exercise replacing the hardware in our primary data centre.
• Our office lighting, in both our Chertsey and Manchester offices, uses energy-efficient LED bulbs, with most of them being fitted with PIR motion detection so that they turn off automatically when the room, or area, is not in use.
• We have decreased our energy use by setting the temperature as standard to 21°C across our office floors, with no heating in use for the large open warehouse spaces.
• Our Chertsey head office is heated via an air heat pump which saves a substantial amount on fuel consumption compared to standard gas heating.
• Our air conditioning and heating unit is switched off on a timer so that it is not in use during the evening or weekends.
• We have an electric vehicle charging point at our Chertsey office, with plans to add one to our Manchester facility this year.
• 43% of our Board of Directors currently drive electric vehicles.
• Our workforce is currently hybrid working, having reduced our office-based workforce from 5 days per week, down to 2-3 days, reducing our employees CO2e emissions created via their mode of transport, whether that be by rail, by car or by bus.
• We offer our clients full Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) compliant disposal services, including the removal and recycling of packaging and all redundant IT and electrical equipment, this equipment is either re-sold, re-used or recycled in compliance with WEEE regulations.
• Our data centre partner is fully committed to the Climate Change Agreement (CCA) for UK Data Centres, they are currently achieving a PUE Score of 1.14, which is significantly lower than the global average. A PUE score is calculated by the total energy used by a data centre, divided by the energy just used by servers. They have also been recognised for industry awards for their sustainability initiatives.

Whilst we are in the early stages of our efforts to address the impact that our business can have on climate change, we are now planning how our future actions will help reduce our carbon emissions and are committed to doing our utmost to protect our environment for the future.

Initiatives we are planning to reduce our emissions:

• We plan to continue to update both the technology in our offices and in our data centre to ensure that we are utilising more energy-efficient solutions across all our operations.
• It is our intention to install solar panels in our offices in Chertsey and Manchester to generate our own renewable electricity source and reduce our electricity consumption.
• It is our intention to replace our vehicle fleet with electric vans, as and when models become commercially viable. We aim to have completed the move to fully electric by 2030.
• We are introducing a sustainability questionnaire for each of our supply partners, with the aim to ensure that we are only working with organisations that are committed to making efforts to fight climate change and reduce GHG emissions.

We embrace the opportunity that a more sustainable approach can bring, by making positive changes to reach a net-zero target we can help to protect the environment and preserve natural resources for future generations.