Sustainability is about all the small – and sometimes not so small – conscious choices that we make every day at home and at work.
In our family, we take sustainability seriously and let circular principles guide our daily decisions. Here are a few examples of sustainability from my family and our household.
We have been driving an electric car for the past five years. We charge it when the electricity grid is not used – at night, for example. This year we drove from Stockholm to Berlin for the Easter holiday, and earlier we even travelled to London with our electric car. We prefer taking the train for shorter holidays, whenever possible.
In our home, we have smart lighting. It’s part of our everyday life to sort the garbage into glass, paper, plastic and metal, and we’ve chosen to buy sustainably made clothes with classic designs that will last longer than fast fashion. When we buy new kitchenware, quality materials such as cast iron will always win over items that would need to be replaced more often. When we’re planning meals that include meat, a nose-to-tail approach is the one we go for. This means choosing less popular cuts of meat.
On a community level, I am the chairman of our housing association where we are driving several circularity topics for all forty-nine households. Heating and electricity are our main focus areas.
What is then that motivates us as citizens to think and act more sustainably? This is an important question to tackle in the green shift, as all societal transformations require a mindset change and new behaviors from each and every one of us.
Nordic citizen survey shows: More knowledge required to make the green shift
It’s important to me to make these conscious choices not only personally, but also professionally.
This is why our Group CIO department revised and improved our Device Return Process.
We started with the device return process in 2008 as part of the former EVRY Sweden. Our processes were improved using agile methods, enabling us to return 99% of all devices and reuse them within their lifecycle. At the end of a device’s life, it’s returned to an external partner to be refurbished and sold on the market. Now we are scaling this device return experience from Sweden to all large geolocations in Tietoevry.
To be able to scale this efficiently, we had to change several core processes within both HR and Procurement. Two people in my team have also spent a considerable amount of time solving the logistical challenges. Surprisingly, getting a box from A to B has been the most challenging part of this initiative.
Reminding our colleagues what they must do is a big part of making this work, so we have even nicknamed our internal process ‘Nagging as a Service’. On a more serious note, we want to enable the managers and employees to make the right choice, but ultimately the responsibility and accountability lie with each of us as an individual.
We are also targeting the new device selection process, where we want to include circularity before selecting a new standard for the company. In 2023, we commit to recycling 100% of Tietoevry hardware – this includes our own devices as well as those provided to customers. We have also factored in the CO2 compensation for all the new devices that we buy.
Read more on our circular economy practices in Tietoevry's sustainability report 2021
By doing all this, we want to make sure our colleagues make a conscious choice in our work environment to reuse, recycle properly and think about our planet.