Green
There is overwhelming consensus that global warming, and the climate change it brings, is real, and that the reduction of carbon emissions is critical for the world we live in.
While there are many elements that play a role in increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the one most prevalent at the intersection of businesses and individuals alike is travel.
Both short-trip road travel and long-distance airline travel are among the leading contributors of C02 emissions. Professional organizations contribute to this issue when employees have no viable alternatives when needing to meet face-to-face with someone outside their own office.
Travel reduction for non-critical reasons has been noted to be the most effective means of reducing a company’s carbon footprint. Technologies that allow for effective face-to-face communication not only reduce energy consumption, but now also hold great promise for companies interested in reducing their overall business costs, gaining competitive advantages and increasing employee productivity and effectiveness.
A Value Example:
An employee’s business-related travel contributes to each individual’s environmental impact and increases what is known as a company’s overall “carbon footprint”. As such, video conferencing is quickly becoming more recognized as a significant component of any professional organization’s “green” initiative as an effective means of face-to-face communications that can reduce the need for business-related travel.
Short-Trip Road Travel: An employee’s 70 mile car trip to a separate office location once a month for a year – or a total of 840 miles traveled – contributes approximately 1,035 pounds of C02 into the atmosphere.
Air Travel: One staff member’s flight from Houston to London to see a customer produces over 4,500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
Air Travel vs. Video Conferencing: If an employee was to use videoconferencing for three meetings instead of getting on a plane, the impact on the environment is the equivalent of taking a car off the planet for an entire year.
BCS as a Partner in Carbon Reduction Initiatives
BCS Global is committed to being an environmental leader by providing advanced communication technologies that:
- Help companies and individuals reduce their own carbon footprint.
- Reduce unnecessary, time consuming and expensive automobile and airline travel for business.
- Improve productivity and enhance communications and relationships.
- Are measurable against bottom line business value.
BCS has successfully implemented its own programs to reduce company wide carbon emissions throughout its offices in Canada, US, China and UK. In order to reduce unnecessary meeting travel, BCS employees use boardroom, desktop and mobile video conferencing solutions between office locations, home offices and with customers and suppliers where possible. BCS global also supports a very dynamic teleworker initiative that serves to create and maintain a strong company culture with an exceptionally high level of individual performance – all while reducing emissions caused by commuting via car, train or air.
The BCS Global Approach to “Going Green”
BCS Global believes that "Going Green" does not necessarily need to raise costs or sacrifice productivity - in fact, the exact opposite can be actualized. BCS Global’s approach to illustrate the value of video conferencing and collaboration as an environmental tool is first to show how it can be an effective business tool that provides bottom line value, return on investment, brand value and a recognizable competitive advantage.
By making video conferencing and collaboration easy to use, reliable and more affordable – with greater audio and video quality than ever before – BCS Global is working with customers to implement programs that encourage increased use of this technology and thus significantly reducing their overall carbon footprint.
BCS Global believes that helping its customers better leverage advanced telepresence and high definition videoconferencing, traditional boardroom collaboration tools, desktop solutions and mobile video services can make these technologies essential elements of their climate change strategies.
Video as a Green “Business” Tool
BCS Global works hard to ensure that every video meeting is successful, easy, reliable and affordable – and that it meets all quality expectations while providing people the ability to connect from anywhere in the world, over virtually any device, with the simple use of a standard remote control, PC or mobile phone.
Besides visual communications environmental savings, an organization also realizes real productivity gains from BCS Global video conferencing solutions by:
- Accelerating decision making
- Scaling knowledge
- Unifying an organization or corporate culture
- Creating better employee work/life balance
- Expanding recruiting capabilities
- Developing greater competitive advantage
“Carbon Free Meeting’s” Program Overview:
The objective of the Carbon Free Meeting program is to illustrate how organizations around the world can still effectively conduct face-to-face meetings while having an impact in reducing their impact on carbon emissions.
Additionally, BCS Global is prepared to go the extra step not only to reduce carbon emissions by reducing unnecessary travel, but also to make an additional positive offset to fight the current high-levels of carbon emissions already in the atmosphere.
The objective of the Carbon Free Meeting program is to illustrate how our customer’s use of BCS Global’s Virtual Presence solution can make a positive impact in the workplace - and beyond - in the firms effort to reduce overall carbon emissions and offset the overall global warming trend.
The main drivers of this program are:
- Creating and illustrating a measurable offset videoconferencing provides vs. road or air travel
- Illustrating how additional value can be added to offset the environment by planting trees in support of the Carbon Free Meeting program
- Illustrate how overall use of videoconferencing increases firm wide efficiency, value and bottom line revenue
How it works:
- Based on a customers utilization of the BCS Global’s Virtual Presence video solution, BCS Global will make an agreed upon donation to the American Forest organization towards planting new trees.
- BCS has arranged that a new tree will be planted for every dollar donated to American Forest:
- Three trees, over 50 years, are needed to compensate for 1-ton of C02
- The number of new trees required to offset one person’s round trip on a commercial airline is:
- NY to London = 4.5 trees
- NY to Los Angeles = 3.2 trees
- NY to Chicago = 1.7 trees
- NY to Singapore = 12.5 trees
- BCS Global will provide a quarterly report against the number of trees planted, the offset value of the aggregate videoconferencing usage for the quarter and the additional additive value in reducing carbon emissions that the program had.
- BCS Global will also conduct a quarterly case study to illustrate how video was utilized within the firm to provide even greater value to office efficiency, communication effectiveness and bottom line savings.
Making it Measurable: BCS Global recognizes that any such program must be measurable and must illustrate value to have a chance at long-term success. To that end, BCS is prepared to provide information that illustrates:
- How the program can not only measurably offset, but also illustrate an additive contribution, of offsetting C02 emissions activities.
- How increasing the use of videoconferencing, or participating in more carbon neutral meetings, not only helps the environment but also adds productivity and value to everyday business practices.
- How Virtual Presence can increase productivity and cut costs vs. other means of face-to-face communications.
Driving the Cause:
At BCS Global, we have long realized that senior level commitment to a carbon reduction program is essential to obtaining the entire organizations buy-in and support.
The BCS Global “C02 Free Meeting” program is a great way to make a positive impact on the environment while demonstrating how increased video usage will actually provide additional benefits such as saving valuable time and money with reduced travel expenses, improving collaboration across the enterprise, and decreasing decision-making time.
BCS Global can help “get the message out” and assist employees of our customer’s businesses to maximize its video conferencing investment as an easy-to-use and very effective business tool.
GLOBAL VIDEO EXCHANGE 
