The cost of sustainability is prohibitively high for some small businesses – here’s how Maintel can help.
Around half of the UK’s private sector businesses are SMEs, making them a crucial part of any sustainability strategy. But environmentally improved practices often come at a price, with smaller businesses unable to cover the cost of carbon-friendly change.
While Maintel’s approach to UN Global Sustainable Development Goal 9 – the promotion of industry innovation and infrastructure – isn’t able to enhance financial, technological and technical support in developing nations, it certainly gives smaller UK enterprises access to larger scale, more sustainable and more efficient technology.
Here’s how we can help SMEs improve their sustainability (which in turn improves ours).
- We can provide sustainable infrastructure (SDG 9 target – 9.1)
A shift to cloud communications and productivity services provides much more than just reliability, resilience, and flexibility for remote workers – there are impressive carbon savings to match. In fact, CO2 emission reductions from migrations to the public cloud could be the equivalent of taking 22 million cars off the road.
A significant reduction in hardware, equipment and energy usage comes with moving traditional phone systems to VoIP. Maintel’s iCarbon Savings Estimator assists in estimating the carbon and cost savings that individual businesses could achieve. And with the development of ICON cloud services, Maintel can deliver all the communication and collaboration functionality and capabilities your business requires to any device in any location, improving the efficiency of how your technology, people and processes combine.
We think the switch to cloud services is so important for the planet that we plant 25 trees in the Maintel Forest for every 500 cloud seats connected through us.
- We can enable access to financial services (SDG 9 target – 9.3)
From creation to growth and long-term survival, small businesses require access to appropriate sources of financing. Yet SMEs often find it harder to fund new infrastructure projects, particularly those with a one-off purchase cost model, as they may lack the collateral required to secure a loan.
It is essential that fledgling and growing businesses have access to the affordable credit needed to adopt digital technology. This won’t just benefit that business – as my previous blogs have pointed out, small businesses make vital contributions to local employment and community success, so the gains are widespread.
While we can’t offer this credit directly, Maintel is an FCA registered Limited Credit Broker, allowing us to introduce customers to lease companies, all overseen by a UK financial regulatory body.
- We aid adoption of clean and environmentally sound processes (SDG 9 target – 9.4)
Electronic hardware is constantly evolving and in need of replacement, but throwing legacy laptops, mobiles, handsets and cables into landfill is not an option. Regulations such as the 2013 WEEE Directive require businesses to create a comprehensive strategy, and for good reason.
Electronic waste contains an extraordinary amount of precious and hazardous materials. Along with toxic chemicals which pollute the land and water supply, valuable gold, lithium, cobalt and copper found in e-waste have a limited global supply.
Creating a full recycling strategy can be complicated and costly for small businesses, so we are making it easier than ever to responsibly dispose of old equipment. Recycling of any hardware technology can be incorporated into customer upgrade plans, with a zero to landfill model and relevant certification for security and sustainability auditing.
And recycling e-waste makes financial sense – there is 100 times more gold in a tonne of e-waste than a tonne of gold ore! Approximately 50% of equipment recovered has some residual value, and we can arrange a buy back incentive. Mantel also offers renewed mobile handsets, which can have up to 87% less environmental impact and are around 20% cheaper than new.
- We’re encouraging innovation through research and development (SDG 9 target – 9.5)
Innovation drives productivity, and a focus on research naturally leads to the development of the most efficient, effective and cutting-edge tools for modern businesses. The dedicated Maintel software team is responsible for the production of our omni-channel contact centre platform, Callmedia CX Now, and the user experience components of our ICON cloud platform.
In addition, the team enables the integration of communications and contact centre platforms with CRM and other applications. Our software is developed in house to improve your teams’ transparency, facilitate self-service interactions, maximize the value of your existing licenses and coordinate communications. In short, this growing team’s entire focus is on our customers – particularly small to medium size organisations – increasing their efficiency and making them work better.
SMEs are a small but mighty force for change.
Maintel’s goal is to reach 50% of the SDG 9 targets, and 2021 saw us at 36%. To improve our achievements further, we are giving smaller customers access to larger, more sustainable, and more efficient communication technology, and encouraging easy and cost-effective refurbishments, recycling and reuse.
And with our Carbon Estimator, we can confidently illustrate how our smaller customers can deliver big results.
