Sustainability Month with Marco Alves (Natixis in Portugal)
To celebrate June as the sustainability month, we challenged Natixis and Marco Alves, Facilities Manager @ Natixis in Portugal, to answer some questions regarding this topic.
Since 2018, Environmental and Social Responsibility has received a great deal of attention by Natixis in Portugal. Back in November of the same year, we have promoted an internal Hackathon, challenging our Team to develop innovative ideas and solutions, to be implemented on the Organization. This represented the first step on our ESR strategy.
One of these ideas led to the creation of Natixis Urban Garden, a self-sustainable garden, located on our rooftop, made up of 26 growbeds. Transforming our terrace into an ecological and productive place, we are able to donate 100% of the harvest to two solidarity institutions in our local community.
This garden, planted and sustained by more than 60 employees, aims to reduce Natixis in Portugal water consumption, organic waste and C02 emission. Watch the video!
In our ESR journey, we are also committed in winning the battle against energy consumption. Being the first Portuguese company to join CUBE 2020 competition last year, we were able to raise awareness, mobilize and involve employees to reduce our ecological footprint and inspire the Tech and Business ecosystem to do the same for a more sustainable and greener planet.
The results couldn’t have been more positive! We won the Platinum Medal on Energy Consumption (up to 25% savings), the Gold Medal in Carbon Emission (between 20% to 25% savings) and Bronze Medal in International Buildings category.
Beside these initiatives, we’ve also achieved the following:
– Reduction of CO2 emissions, as a result of the decrease in the electrical consumption of our building
– Implementation of a better design of the life cycle of technological equipment
– Raise awareness for Circular Economy, focusing on Recycling, Sustainable Development and Waste Reduction with a beach clean-up initiative and a waste reduction workshop
– Elimination of plastic and single-use product
– Introduction recycled paper in printers and reduction of its number
– Installation of water-saving aerators in all bathrooms tap
– Launch of an internal contest to create a “Green” application for car fleet management at Natixis in Portugal.
At the moment, we are also working on the achievement of BREEAM-in-use Certification.
What is Green IT?
Green IT is about putting into practice a sustainable environment for the use of technological resources, that is, the use of computing resources in the ‘cleanest’ way possible, respecting that the activities involved in IT advances do not bring so many negative outcomes to the planet.
At Natixis, several programs are being implemented, in order to create awareness for this theme, namely: My Green Footprint platform which measures employees’ individual consumption when printing, development of an app using the least amount of resources possible and the launch of internal campaigns for better e-mail practices and usage.
What does sustainable mean to you and how important is it to a company like yours?
Sustainability is about combining social, cultural and economic development and environmental conservation, in order to guarantee the world as we know today for future generations.
We are proud to have the opportunity to join Natixis in this journey as it is a pioneer and innovator in sustainability matters. The Green Weighting Factor mechanism is a good example, together with the relevance of this topic in the Organization’s Strategic Plan. Dedicated ESR Teams worldwide are collaborating, in order to reduce the ecological footprint of our business activity.
