An Update on FMC’s Sustainability Initiatives

We’re sure that by now you’re aware of our partnership with the Niagara Sustainability Initiative and their Carbon Project– either through our twitter posts, blog posts, our mentions on the NSI Website, or the Carbon Project Logo on our front page.  As part of this partnership, and our overall goal to become a sustainable company, we’re going to provide semi-annual updates on our progress as a sustainable company, the steps we’ve taken to get there, and what we have planned for the future.  This is our first update, but you can see some of our previous initiatives here and here.

Here are some other initiatives we’ve put into place:

Vehicle Idle Times

As part of our daily work our technicians are required to drive throughout Ontario in order to properly service your fire alarm monitoring equipment, security alarm equipment, CCTV video surveillance equipment, or anything else we service in your building.  As part of this, we outfit our vehicles with GPS tracking units which allow us to monitor locations, speed and driving habits.  It also allows us to track and graph how much time our vehicles are idling, using fossil fuels while not actively working.  Our goal is to bring our vehicle idling times to within industry norms, and then below.  This GPS system will also become integrated with our servicing software to allow for more efficient dispatches for service calls – reducing the amount of time you have to wait for a service call, as well as reducing our carbon footprint in getting there!

Ensuring ROHS Compliance

We work with electronics on a day-to-day basis to monitor your security alarm system, fire alarm system or sprinkler system.  We have made a decision to only use electronics which have gained ROHS compliance.  What does this mean?

ROHS stands for “Restriction of Hazardous Substances”, and this directive restricts the use of hazardous materials in various types of electronic devices.   These hazardous materials include:

• Lead (Pb)
• Mercury (Hg)
• Cadmium (Cd)
• Hexavalent Chromium: (Cr VI)
• Polybrominated Biphenyls (PBB)
• Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDE)

A European initiative, there is currently no Canadian legislative requirement for electronics companies to comply with this standard. We have chosen to only work with manufacturers who do comply with this standard, a we feel it the right thing to do.  These manufacturers include:

ROHS compliance (in addition to other regulatory factors) will be a key factor in determining whether we work with manufacturers on a going-forward basis.

What we have planned:

In the next year, we have several initiatives planned to move us towards our goal of becoming a green, sustainable organization.  These include:

• A full energy audit of our operations, to be completed by NSI.
• Ongoing monitoring of all consumption through NSI’s reporting tool.
• In-Office Waste Diversion initiatives
• Elimination of paper service, inspection and job tickets and conversion to hand-held, wireless devices for this purpose
• The continued push to digitize invoicing with our customers
• Reduction in overall paper consumption
• Begin working with our suppliers with respect to our environmental initiative.

We’ll keep you up to date with how these initiatives are proceeding in our next semi-annual update.

If you have any questions about our sustainability program, or wish to help please do not hesitate to contact us.