DALIM builds a formal sustainability program

DALIM Software has taken a bigger step towards corporate social responsibility with research and implementation of a sustainability policy. In doing so, it has confirmed a number of new and on-going initiatives and the engagement of a person responsible for building and monitoring the policy.

The company has been thinking about sustainability for quite a while. In 2014, it decided to power all its operations by hydroelectricity from Switzerland. From this first step, Dalim began electrifying its car pool, switching to electrified two-wheel transportation for daily commuting and eliminating plastic waste. Through these measures, the company has been able to eliminate the emission of approximately 375,000 kg of CO2 every year. And, the company is working on much more.

While it would seem that a software company has little opportunity to affect sustainability, Dalim says it understands that digitizing everything has an environmental impact. For example, while email messages spend energy when printed, saved messages also consume energy, resulting in the emission of some amount of CO2. While miniscule on its own, it increases substantially by the number of messages that people typically keep in storage. Data management and storage has a major environmental impact. Every day, PDF files are created from various applications, for multiple purposes. They start filling cloud storage, use precious mobile data volume, or jam internet connections. Dalim wants to explore the environmental impact of reducing PDF files, for example, from 10Mb to 2Mb. It is one of the reasons the company created PDFLight, a free application that provides high-end PDF file optimization.

The company has also appointed Jonas Klein to oversee corporate social responsibility. “While Dalim Software has been conscious of its corporate environmental footprint and the footprint of our products, this responsibility is so vital that we have tasked Jonas Klein to develop a specific, actionable plan. Nobody had been previously assigned this task,” notes Carol Werlé, CEO. “We are now supervising everything we do related to our sustainability program, and is building a roadmap to plan and structure our activities.”

Klein concludes, “As a start, we are focusing on the seventeen UN sustainable development goals as a guide to assure a holistic approach. While we do not create a product that people can physically touch, there is still a measurable impact in many different categories. We hope to conduct the science that can measure the impact of these and offer solutions as time progresses.”

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