Sustainability at Borderless

The climate crisis is an acute threat to our modern world, which is why environmental issues are a key consideration for Borderless. As a small company, we’re committed to sustainable development as a guiding principle across our work. Our aim is to reduce the impact on the environment from our operations and to ensure our planet’s future is an integral and fundamental part of projects and people we choose to work with.

What we do currently…

Travel

96% of the time we walk to work every day. It’s easy, and a lovely thing to do as the office is at the top of the garden. When we work as a collective – we’ve all worked from home since before it was cool and utilise tools like Teams, Zoom, Skype and the good old phone to keep in touch with partners, consultants and clients. When we do need to travel, we tend to use rail as it also means we can get more work done but on occasion, mainly as we’re based in the middle of nowhere – we do use the car!

Green space

Being based at the foot of the downs, we have access to heaps of green space. We’re in the process of re-wilding our hedgerows and growing wildflower areas and returning some of our green space back to traditional Sussex Downland. We also have a veg patch and grown our own salads and vegetables whenever possible.

Community

We support our local village hall in the capacity of treasurer and marketing services. In 2021 we’ve helped them to install solar panel and energy efficient lighting.

Recycling and office waste

As a digital business, we generate very little waste. We recycle everything we can and wherever possible and operate a 99% paperless office, with everything stored in the cloud – other than the odd notebook here and there. Our food waste is turned into compost for the garden and due to the number of trees we have on site, in the autumn we collect the fallen leaves to generate heaps of leaf mould to enrich our soil.

Energy consumption

We’ve always used green energy suppliers, we’re currently with Bulb will be moving to Octopus later this year as Bulb winds up it’s business. We’ve have done the most we can to ensure our work space is as energy efficient with triple glazing and using Passivhaus principles where possible.

Pensions

Our pension plan is provided by Nutmeg and we have aligned our investment strategy with social responsible investing – our pot’s overall ESG is 8.0/10

Sustainability and our work

We use good design principles

With all of our projects we try to integrate the following principles to ensure lower server loads and efficiency by considering the following:

  • whether the website’s content and design has used colour imagery and film efficiently and to add genuine value and not garnish
  • whether the UI design used the minimum number of custom fonts
  • if the experience respect user privacy and provides clear guidelines for maintaining it
  • that the user journeys been planned to help the user achieve their goals efficiently
  • that the product or service design process accounts for human and non-human stakeholders
  • whether the project promote good health and wellness or could be adapted to improve mental well-being
  • whether the content easy to find, accessible and actionable – where appropriate.

With our development partners we strive to

  •  ensure the product or service safe and secure and avoids tracking user behaviour and collecting data unnecessarily
  • that any development follow web standards for both best practice and accessibility and we open source principles wherever possible
  • that the hosting located as close as possible to the core user base or uses a CDN and that it runs the latest tech stack?
  • that server side caching or static technology in place to minimize server load?
  • wherever possible that the hosting powered by renewable energy and that the hosting provider has a strong environmental policy

Our future action plan

  • we aim to always promote good design and UX principles to help reduce both the cognitive load on humans but also the impact on servers used for web hosting
  • promote responsibility for the environment within our work;
  • reduce the use of energy, water and other resources;
  • minimise waste by reduction, re-use and recycling methods;
  • comply with all relevant environmental legislation/regulation;;
  • encourage partners to commit to the sustainable development philosophy;
  • identify and attend appropriate training, and keep up-to-date with current thinking, advice and information for businesses
  • develop new ideas and initiatives;

We’re in great company

Just some of our substantiality clients we’re proud to have worked with over the years. And who’s work we support in the impact they’re making the world and the climate crisis:

Accountability Framework – the Accountability Framework initiative (AFi) is a collaborative effort to build and scale up ethical supply chains for agricultural and forestry products.

British Ecological Society – who are working towards a world in which nature and people thrive.

FLOCERT – as the global certification body for Fairtrade, FLOCERT is on a mission to assure fairness. They offer an array of services to support companies in sourcing on Fairtrade principles, where no Fairtrade Standard applies.

NHS – Sussex Community Trust Care without Carbon project – an award-winning project design to create NHS workforce behaviour change towards the environment

Pukka Herbs – create award-winning organic herbal teas and supplements and provide expert wellbeing advice as part of their sustainability mission.

WWF-UK – are the world’s leading independent conservation organisation. Our mission is to create a world where people and wildlife can thrive together.