Environmental Policy
Effective: October 2024
1: About this policy
High Speed Training Limited is committed to considering its impact on the environment across all areas of its business, supply chain and community. We will operate in compliance with all relevant environmental legislation and we will strive to use pollution prevention and environmental best practices in all we do.
2: About us
High Speed Training Limited is a UK based company operating in the education sector.
We are an employee-owned business and B-Corp certified.
We provide online training courses globally via our website www.highspeedtraining.co.uk and offer a wide range of supporting articles and content via our hub at www.highspeedtraining.co.uk/hub/
The environment is important to us and is covered under one of our Core values of “Leaving things better than we found them” and by being “committed to doing our best every day”.
You can find out more about us and our values here: www.highspeedtraining.co.uk/about-us/
3: About our impact
We believe protecting the environment and working sustainably starts with us and the product we sell.
We consider online training itself to have a number of benefits to the environment both for our business and our customers through:
- Digital access - zero customer travel required, worldwide
- Digital production - our travel is kept to an absolute minimum (almost zero when we work from home)
- Digital certificate delivery - Available on request
See Section 4 - Materials below for more information on how we manage our certificates.
We recognise we impact on the environment and our community through our:
- Supply chain
- Direct and indirect use of non renewable fuels
- Use of scarce/non renewable raw materials in supply chains or purchases
- Use of harmful materials or high energy consuming production processes
- Disposal of waste
- Relationships with the local community
- Welfare of people
4: Our response
We do not put costs above environmental concerns.
Supply chain
We seek to work with like minded suppliers and take reasonable steps to assess their policies and processes.
Energy use
We constantly review energy use to keep that at a minimum and use modern energy saving products and materials where possible. We use building management systems to control heating and ventilation. Our highest energy requirement is electricity for which we use a 100% renewable energy supplier and actively promote the switching off of devices not in use.
Emissions
We understand carbon emissions need to be taken into account as part of our, and our supply chains, business operations. With this in mind we have recently carried out a carbon mapping exercise to understand our carbon footprint and our scope 1,2 and 3 emissions, with a view to working to improve these during 2025.
Materials
After applying the principles of Reduce, Reuse, Repair and Recycle our purchases will, where practical, consider the materials and processes used in their creation, delivery, service life and eventual disposal. For our cleaning requirements we use only 100% environmentally friendly products, recycled paper goods and biodegradable bin bags.
Our largest production use of materials is paper for our certificates which we monitor carefully by using one of the country’s first Carbon Balanced Printers accredited to ISO 14001.
Our certificates are printed on Carbon Balanced Paper and are 100% recyclable.
Disposal of waste
We aim to keep our waste production to a minimum and recycle as much of that as possible. Where we do need to dispose of waste it is segregated appropriately and collected only via licensed organisations. We operate a number of recycling schemes to ensure as little as possible ends up in landfills.
Community relations
We endeavour to create good community relations by using local labour and materials where appropriate and keeping noise, traffic and pollution levels to an absolute minimum.
We actively seek local volunteering opportunities such as tree planting and community clean up projects and aim to keep good open communications with neighbours should they raise any concerns.
Welfare
High Speed Training is a caring, responsible employer and neighbour, complying with all legal requirements.
5: Our due diligence
We extend our commitment to our suppliers by making them aware of our policies, and expect the same standards in return.
We work closely with our core suppliers and seek ways to Reduce, Reuse, Repair and Recycle together.
New suppliers or processes have their environmental credentials considered before being used.
We do this to:
- ensure we maintain the same or higher standards
- highlight areas of potential risk
- seek continuous improvement
6: Our Risk and Compliance
We consider ourselves to be low waste producers due to the electronic nature of our products creation and access. Any waste we do produce is low volume general office waste and we have a number of recycling schemes in place at our single UK based head office to deal with this.
We work with a reputable third party to recycle and repurpose our surplus tech products for social good.
If a new supplier or process change would result in an increase in waste we would not commence activity until reassurances were met.
Should evidence of adverse environmental impact come to light with an existing supplier or process we would enforce zero tolerance and immediately seek improvements.
7: Our Effectiveness and KPIs
We keep the environment under constant review in our day to day business and keep awareness high.
Whether our workers are based at our HQ or working from their home offices, we have policies and guidance in place to help support responsible and sustainable working environments. We understand the impact of our energy usage, waste management and procurement practices, and are firm believers in transparency and accountability when it comes to our environmental performance.
Using a fully Carbon Balanced Printer, we are offsetting our carbon footprint and are contributing to the support of the World Land Trust to preserve critically threatened habitats.
Currently we estimate we recycle 80% of all waste produced.
Our learners are provided with the opportunity to make good environmental choices by opting for digital copies of completed course certificates.
Our target is simple and is to always strive towards reducing our current impact.
8: Our Training
As a training provider we constantly invest in educating ourselves and others. Right from our employee onboarding through to our annual compliance refreshers and acknowledgement of our policies we aim to give our employees the skills and ability to identify and report any potential breaches to and suggestions to improve this policy.
9: Our next steps
We will take the following actions:
- Communicating this policy across our business
- Investigate improvements to our current processes and measures
- Keeping it under annual review
10: Sign off
This statement was approved by:
Peter Towell - Legal and Compliance Manager
High Speed Training Limited
Date: October 2024
