Kyocera seeds greener channel with new programme

Green channel initiative launched to promote continuous sustainability improvement

Print vendor Kyocera Mita has rolled out a green channel programme to assist distributors, resellers and dealers to transform their businesses and promote themselves as environmentally responsible.

Tracey Rawling Church, director of brand and reputation at Kyocera, said that increasingly customers are asking IT companies and channel businesses to prove their green credentials.

"Increasingly we are getting involved in different tenders along with our channel partners where the customer is quite demanding in terms of sustainability, and that increasingly includes not just product impacts but supply chain impacts," she said. "So we really feel that we have got to be able to easily identify and recognise the channel partners that have sustainable operations and processes."

Rawling Church said partners can achieve Green Partner or Green Partner Plus levels reflecting their score against 10 criteria, going beyond awareness and promotion of greener offerings to include environmental management systems, sustainability targets, procurement policy, energy use and so on.

"It still isn't easy being green," she said. "Partners have taken away the audit spreadsheet already. There is quite an amount of time and resource involved."

Partners that had already qualified for industry-standard green accreditations such as the Carbon Trust Standard or ISO14,0001 would be fast-tracked, she added, and others would be helped to achieve sustainability targets.

David Gibson, managing director of partner Altodigital, lauded the programme.

"We have always focused on environmental credentials, not just our own organisation's carbon footprint but ensuring that our customers benefit," Gibson said.

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