Bangalore-based Almas Fathima, a seasoned CRE professional dons, the hat of the organization’s brand ambassador for energy efficiency and sustainable operations. With robust support from the top management, she ensures that ‘Green’ initiatives are of prime focus in all activities implemented across offices spanning top tier cities and rural areas.
The bank’s Social Service Department and ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) initiative, consider environment friendly practices as their top priority. Ripples of the “Green” efforts starting with the simple initiative of discontinuing paper cups and plates. This initiative towards environmental sustainability had a tidal effect on other initiatives like procurement of energy-saving LED lighting in all offices, usage of recycled materials, waste segregation at source coupled with responsible disposal strategies, digital business cards, green cleaning chemicals, solar energy as the RE (renewable energy) alternative wherever feasible, inverter air conditioners and sustainable construction materials,” said Almas. With this holistic approach across 750+ offices, the efforts towards promoting eco-friendly practices in the bank created a profound positive impact on the environment.
It did not stop with the in-house initiatives for Almas. She extended her sustainability efforts to supply chain partners, causing domino effect across the ecosystem. She ensured that the vendors and partners are scrutinised diligently on their compliance to the basic ESG norms such as usage of environment friendly materials in their products, sustainability in their operations, strict adherence to human rights & governance principles.
Cleaning is an evolving industry and there are so many innovations happening. We would definitely like to put to use whichever suits each one of us.
The bank has outsourced facilities management to third parties. Almas has engaged regional partners over others to encourage diversity and savour the significant flavours of each of them. While UDS caters to South, West is jointly serviced by UDS & GroupL, East by Tenon & S&IB, and North by Sunrise Housekeeping & Facilities Management.
“The initial resistance in transitioning to the green products is certainly felt as they do not provide the same level of comfort as non-green ones,” laments Fathima. “However, these probably need to be used for a longer time and treated more to get the desired results,” she added.