Climate Action
In the journey to a greener world, we see the environmental performance of our offices, facilities and technology infrastructure not as an endpoint, but as a basis to inspire our customers, business partners, suppliers, investors and the wider communities to do more.
Serious About our Impact
As a leading ICT company, we take our environmental impact seriously and have implemented an Environmental Management System (EMS) that meets the ISO14001 standard.
Our EMS provides a comprehensive framework for managing operational risks relating to carbon, energy, and waste management. Through implementing this system, we proactively identify areas that need improvement and track our sustainability progress.
To achieve this, HKBN’s Environment Taskforce and the senior management team are responsible for reviewing and enhancing our Environmental Policy on a regular basis. In addition, we carry out internal and external audits annually, and regularly review the effectiveness of our internal EMS to facilitate continual progress in our sustainability journey.
Environmental Performance
As we continue to develop our science-based targets, we have devised a two-year energy-saving plan with the ambitious goal of reducing electricity consumption by 14% in FY24, compared to FY22. Aside from this updated target, we remain committed to achieving our goal of 55% waste diversion by FY25. To monitor progress, monthly reports are regularly provided to our senior management.
Climate Governance & Strategy
Our commitment to addressing climate-related priorities and challenges, including climate change, is reflected in our three-tier governance structure, overseen by our Board.
As part of our ongoing climate action efforts, we undertake a comprehensive process to identify and prioritise climate-related risks and opportunities, in line with the TCFD recommendations. This helps us methodically assess the potential impacts, and as a result, develop proactive plans for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
To effectively identify climate-related risks and opportunities that are pertinent to our operations and value chain, our internal stakeholders are regularly engaged through workshops and surveys that give us a broader understanding of the potential risks and opportunities, and prioritise actions based on stakeholder feedback.
A Climate-resilient Future
Knowing that climate change can have a tremendous impact on businesses and communities, we’re boldly transforming our business into a climate resilient organisation. HKBN’s Climate Risk Management (CRM) team helps to identify our business risks related to climate change and ensure they are actively mitigated. The CRM team meets annually and reports its progress directly to our Management Committee, which makes necessary recommendations to our Board of Directors.
Our Low Carbon Commitment
HKBN has a critical role to play in helping Hong Kong transition to a low-carbon economy, and we have committed to set globally recognised science-based emissions reduction targets (SBTs) by FY25, on top of supporting the Business Environment Council’s Low Carbon Charter for years.
Through our commitment, we’ve pledged to achieve carbon reduction targets via strategic decarbonisation across our operations. Furthermore, we actively promote climate awareness across our business units and are engaging our Talents to address climate change together.
Skin-in-the-Game
At HKBN, one of the best ways we drive amazing results is by putting our “skin-in-the-game”. Across our company, we’re encouraging our senior leaders and Talents to come up with innovative ideas to improve our sustainability, especially if what they propose can lead to quantifiable climate action win-win (such as improved energy consumption) and improved cost savings for HKBN.
Smartly Eco-innovative
As a group of technologists, we believe there are near limitless ways technology and smart solutions can help improve our company’s impact on the environment. Over the years, we have systematically utilised advancements in IoT, automation, and eco-friendly options across areas like lighting, equipment, packaging and temperature control.
Across of operations, we’re also implementing numerous changes and tweaks that are delivering significant long-term impacts, like insisting that office renovations must feature an optimal use of second-hand office furniture and recycled materials, or replacing most of our desktop computers with energy-efficient thin client computers, and swapping obsolete data centre equipment with lower-energy equipment upgrades.
Stakeholder Engagement
Wider climate action progress can only be made through engagement with our stakeholders. From educational awareness to commercial/community partnership initiatives, a significant aspect of our efforts involve working or engaging with:
- Talents – 4,800+ aware and informed Talents can make a huge difference at work and within our wider local communities.
- Customers – With over 1 million household customers and over 110,000 enterprise customers, the scale of our impact and reach is enormous.
- Suppliers – By working closely with suppliers, we can make a difference beginning at the product design or service planning stage.
- Community – Whenever there’s a need to step up for action or to collaborate with nonprofits, we’re all in.
- Investors – We’re engaging investors to help them see greater value in environmental progress when assessing a company’s value.
Something from Nothing
Something from Nothing is a pioneering project that has required zero capital investment from HKBN, despite numerous energy efficiency upgrades implemented at our various office and data centre locations. Expenditures for all retrofitting have been fully funded by investor Blue Sky, which receives a fraction of our energy cost savings as compensation. Since launching in 2016, Something from Nothing has directly accounted (as of FY22) for 8,728,522 kWh electricity and $3.4 million in energy cost savings.
Recycling WLAB
Since 2019, HKBN has been an active partner with the Hong Kong Battery Recycling Centre, which safely and responsibly recycles our Waste Lead Acid Batteries (WLAB). In FY22, our recycling efforts diverted 77,128 kg of hazardous WLAB from entering local landfills.
Going Green with our Business Partnerships
In late 2022, we continued with a push to make Purpose and ESG sustainability a bigger part of our everyday business – by teaming up with TP-Link. With goals aligned, we took the partnership to new levels of green-responsibility and launched our Wi-Fi 6 Router Upgrade & Recycle programme (featuring incentives recycle old routers) available for all consumers in Hong Kong.
Greener ICT Operations
As a company operating an extensive network infrastructure, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) are areas that can make significant improvements to our energy consumption. Pursuing this opportunity, we have implemented measures like enhancing the chiller systems in our major data centres with new upgrades, consolidating data centre equipment to improve power usage effectiveness, and more. Additionally, our Network team is also working to enhance our network infrastructure with the goal of a more streamlined and efficient network operation.
Customer Equipment Recovery and Recycling Programme
With the growing indispensability of technology, the problem of electronic waste has become increasingly urgent. Embracing our responsibility, our dedicated teams have actively engaged in recovering vital components and precious metals from the equipment used by our customers for broadband and cable connectivity. Here's how our program works: whenever a customer terminates or upgrades service, we retrieve and process their old equipment. By doing so, we ensure that critical materials are kept out of landfills. In 2023 alone, the programme successfully recovered and recycled 42.29 tonnes of valuable metals.
Smarter Offices
On a continuous basis, we are finding new ways to be more environmentally friendly in our offices. Examples of this include implementing smart applications that detect when a room is unoccupied and automatically turn off the lights and air conditioning. Equally meaningful, our transition to digital workflows has significantly reduced our reliance on paper by about 1 tonne annually. Mindful that there is always room for improvement, this year our operations in Hong Kong initiated the Paper Cut Challenge. Our challenge engages all our departments in a collective effort to achieve a further 10% reduction in paper usage.