Corporate and social responsibility
How does a business commit to operating in an ethical, sustainable way and how does it consider its impact on society, the environment, and the economy?
As an SME, Computair may not have quite the same resources as some of the software industry titans, but we are nevertheless committed to living and working responsibly and trying to make a positive impact.
Read on for more information on what we’re doing.
Photo taken by a member of the Computair team during the AMCA Annual Meeting 2023 in Barcelona.
Local community
Sponsorship of sporting organisations
We are aware of the significant health benefits sport can bring and we see youth sport in particular as being a great way to develop healthy active habits for life.
Toddington Rovers Football Club
We are proud and long-standing sponsors of the local junior football team Toddington Rovers, and in particular the Under 14s Dragons Team, who display the Computair logo on their team shirts.
Tring Rugby Union Football Club We are also delighted to sponsor Tring Rugby Club. Computair has supported two team players each season over a number of years and has also been a shirt sponsor for the M & J tour shirts.
Volunteering and fundraising
We encourage engagement with local charities and we have staff who volunteer in a variety of settings. Our MD, Richard Phelan, is involved with a children’s circus skills group which really is as exciting as it sounds, teaching unicycle riding, stilt-walking, juggling and aerial silks, to name a few!
One of our original co-founders, Nigel Taffs, is a skilled player of the mandolin and the ukulele and his band, Last of the Summer Ukuleles, organises frequent musical events to fund-raise for local charities, as well as playing in residential care homes for the elderly.
Other voluntary work undertaken by the team includes a ‘helping hands’ group offering lifts to the elderly, assisting a local competitive swimming club and helping local theatre group TADS Teens with anything from set design to generating publicity.
Pitchlocator app for the Milton Keynes and district development youth football league
Computair is proud to sponsor an exciting project helping youth football in our local Milton Keynes and District Development League. Community Sporting Partnership UK offers a brilliant app, the CSP Pitch Locator, as well as a website and accompanying handbook, which all help parents navigate their way to match fixtures around the country.
The environment
The nature of our business is such that no physical product is manufactured and therefore no chemical or other byproducts are created, but there’s a lot more to a company’s impact on the environment: how much carbon do we generate and where does it come from, how much energy do we consume and how renewable is its source, where does discarded hardware go?
Our carbon footprint
Although Covid-19 and the resulting national lockdowns are thankfully a memory now, Computair team members continue to combine days in the office with days working from home. This has the effect of considerably reducing our carbon footprint by cutting down on the distances travelled by car on the commute to work. We also participate in the government Cycle to Work scheme, while team members living locally both cycle and walk to the office.
An exciting new project for us is our participation in Trees4Travel, tree-planting to offset carbon emissions. Read more on our dedicated page:
Renewable energy
In 2021, we changed our electricity supplier to one which produced energy from 100% renewable sources. Depending on the carbon intensity of the time of day, our office CO2 emissions were substantially reduced to as little as 31g per kWh of electricity, compared with a UK average of 233g.
However, we knew that more could be done and after a period of research and cost analysis, in 2024 we made the decision to install solar panels on the roof of the office.
More details about this to come, but we’re seeing a substantial amount of electricity now being self-generated, reaching a peak during the summer months.
Recycling
It may be obvious, but recycling is still an important cornerstone of caring for the environment and we do our best by recycling plastics, tins, paper, cardboard, batteries and ink cartridges, collecting those items here in the office before either recycling in kerbside recycling collection, taking to a local recycling point or dispatching them to specialist waste collection companies.
Being a software company, we do also end up with computer hardware which is outdated, or which is no longer functioning. We collect this, and when there is a large enough quantity, it is transported to the local household waste and recycling centre.