allpay

Today, over 4.5 million end customers benefit from allpay’s services. The company, based on Whitestone Business Park in Hereford, was founded in 1994 and provides payment solutions including direct debit, online, credit, debit and prepaid cards to public and private sector clients. With sustainability high on their agenda, we met with Jamie Taylor, Head of Site Operations at the company, to find out more.

How did your journey start?

Our journey to net zero started as Greener Footprints launched. allpay had created a staff group called 'Net Zero Heroes' looking hard at energy consumption and getting to work to reduce it.  We signed up to the Greener Footprints network because we wanted to learn from others. We are not sustainability experts, and we knew when we started on this journey, we had a lot to learn from people working close by across different sectors. We’ve found it helpful to meet and talk through ideas, to visit local businesses and see what they are doing. You pick up ideas at every turn.

What have we done so far?

We have smart data in place for multiple buildings across our Whitestone estate. As we set out to lower our energy consumption, we have analysed data from our energy supplier to inspire small improvements. That covered things like changing the lights to LED, removing single-use plastic cups (all reusable now), adding timers on air conditioners in meeting rooms, as well as adding PIR energy-saving sensors in certain areas of the building.

Solar PV panels have also been added to our warehouse, and we now have eight EV charging stations in our onsite car park encouraging staff to make the change to electric. We plan work carefully – ‘ganging’ tasks so we're optimising our machine use.

We are challenging at every level where we can, to save energy. While we still have a lot to look at, there is a wider understanding that this is very much work in progress. We are continuing to work on initiatives that could help us reach net zero, understanding the support available to help us achieve this.

Any big wins?

We have achieved our ISO 50001 certification (demonstrating effective energy management) and have secured the Mastercard Sustainability Badge underlining our environmentally conscious way of working.

The manufacture of c. 3 million cards onsite now utilises 100 per cent recycled plastic and all waste plastic is collected and used for future production completing a circular loop.

In this industry (and there are three billion plastic payment cards shipped worldwide each year) there are ambitions to increase the re-use of plastic, or to improve its recyclability - basically to introduce more environmentally friendly solutions for card bodies.