Sustainability & Environmental Policy

Advantage provides IT, Cyber Security, Cloud, and Networking Solutions to businesses throughout New Zealand and the Pacific Region. We recognise that our activities have an impact on our environment and pledge to do our best to comply with social, environmental, and economic sustainability through our daily activities.

To support our efforts, we have developed an environmental and sustainability policy.

The following 3-pillars form the basis of this policy:

• Environmental sustainability
• Social sustainability
• Economic sustainability

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

We are a responsible business and try to minimise the impact of our activities on the environment whilst maintaining a high standard of service to our clients.

This policy outlines our commitment to minimising our impact on the environment and how we aim to continually improve our environmental performance as we carry out our day-to-day activities.

Following an extensive review of our activities and operations, we have identified several key areas that impact on our environment:

• Energy consumption
• Air emissions
• Resource use
• Waste to landfill
• Logistics
• Supplier environmental impact

Working in partnership with our team, customers, and suppliers, we continually raise awareness of environmental issues. Additionally, we work together to make continuous improvements to our operations, and ensuring compliance with all current environmental legislation as a minimum.

Our commitment is to implement improvements in the following areas:

Energy Consumption

We use energy for heating and lighting, as well as to run our datacentre operations.

Energy consumption is monitored continuously and we seek to implement energy efficiency measures wherever practical.

An example of an inititiave is the use of Windows Group Policy to manage business and customer wide power settings. We are aware that we guide technology purchase decisions, and we take those responsibilities seriously.

As such, we always go for options that help the environment e.g. lower power options, as every small action helps.

Air Emissions

Where possible we reduce our air emissions. This is achieved by increasing our use of remote monitoring, remote support, and remote maintenance of IT systems.

Furthermore, we aim to exploit unified communication and collaboration technology to reduce travel and support more flexible working.

Resource Use

Reducing our consumption of resources and improving the efficient use of resources, including our use of water and energy is extremely important.

We have committed to run a fully paperless office by 2024.

Waste to Landfill

Much of our waste packaging and IT equipment is currently recycled.

Packaging is re-used wherever possible.

One of our responsibilities is to ensure that our customers’ old, end-of-life hardware is recycled responsibly. We engage reputable vendors for this purpose to reduce the impact of waste.

Logistics

There is a high reliance on logistics services to deliver IT hardware to our customers, and we recognise that this has an impact on the environment.

Wherever possible, we try to minimise the number of deliveries required for any project and make use of logistics businesses with sound environmental policies.

Supplier Environmental Impact

Wherever possible, we work with suppliers who have demonstrated their commitment to reducing their impact on our environment in their activities, helping drive sustainability throughout our supply chain.

To meet our commitments, we:

• Provide senior management oversight and review of environmental policies and performance, providing resources for their effective implementation.
• Include our team in our environmental programme and provide necessary training wherever possible.
• Encourage appropriate consideration of sustainability and environmental issues in the range of IT services that we provide to our customers.
• Review our environmental policy regularly to ensure that we are doing all that we can to sustain our environment.

SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

Advantage are committed to forming quality relationships and engagements with our staff, suppliers, clients and stakeholders. We have a documented code of conduct and supplier policy, supported by our value statements.

Additionally, we are committed to creating employment and training opportunities within the regions we operate in. Partnerships with leading learning institutions allows us to offer internships and we regularly hire through this process.

Within our community, Advantage supports several charities who directly contribute to our communities.

ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY

The shareholders and management are committed to an economically sustainable future.

To ensure this, we invest in the future of our business and we are focussed on long term financial performance, productivity and product development.