| Every time we burn fossil fuels such as gas, coal or oil, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Easier to measure are the direct carbon emissions that we are responsible for. This includes the amount of gas and electricity we use in our houses, the amount of petrol or diesel we burn in our car, and the number and distance of flights we take. The Carbon Account is a tool to help us measure these direct emissions.
At TimeTec, we're constantly looking for ways to further reduce the impacts our products have on the environment. While there are some study reports that explain online shopping is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional retailing methods, TimeTec is constantly taking extra effort to deliver all our resources via online means to carry out business operations and ultimately achieve the same goal. |
| Lowering The Carbon Account |
| TimeTec has set forth two main objectives for our brand, first is to help our dealers market our products easier, and second, is to help them reduce their dependency on technical support.
These objectives, heavily furnished with our extra-ordinary online resources plan, have successfully and tremendously reduced unnecessary sales visits or technical traveling on the roads for our dealers around the world over the years. All the needed resources can be easily accessed on the web, including comprehensive online training materials, and technical tips, which has proved helpful to the customers and dealers in reducing transportation costs.
Besides that, our products are not only designed to have low energy consumption; we also work towards utilizing web-enabled technology to improve remote communications and achieve long distant technical support. Furthermore, the introduction of online tools such as TeamViewer for remote desktop support, has helped to further enhance these objectives. Since 2013, the Company had stopped issuing paper cheques to our local suppliers, and we have replaced it with the implementation of paperless online payment process. The online payment transfer is one of our efforts to be more involved in Carbon Accounting by eliminating the travelling need for the suppliers to collect and bank in the cheques into the bank. |
| Reducing Packaging Waste |
| We have worked to see that some of our TimeTec's hardware products and accessories are designed to be collapsible, to be able to reduce packaging size and also to ease transportation.
Since early 2011, TimeTec has made significant progress to reduce excess packaging in the shipments of its hardware products to customers and has introduced additional types of recyclable packing materials to protect items while in transit. The resizing of our packaging also plays a big role in reducing waste as well as transportation cost. Most orders of TimeTec's hardware products are shipped in corrugated packaging, which on average contain 43% recovered fiber content. Once used, these containers are 100% recyclable for use in the manufacturing of other paper products. At the start of 2011, we started a "Going Green" campaign to further reduce the use of paper in our products by putting a stop to all user manual print-outs for TimeTec's hardware and software, replacing them with an all new DVD which contains everything the customers' need in one disk. All contents are professionally paginated, and designed to be easily accessible. |
| At TimeTec, we will be continuing to implement environmental and energy-saving initiatives across all parts of the company. TimeTec employees at all levels dive deep into every nook and cranny of the process to identify waste and design alternative solutions that are more energy efficient. As one of our continuing efforts in reducing carbon footprint, we have invented and developed TimeTec's revolutionary clocking method deploying GPS, NFC, Beacon and smartphone technology in time attendance and guard patrolling solution. The effort in introducing the much simpler clocking alternatives has reduced the demand for hardware and their packaging materials, and consequently lessen manufactury frequency and transportation, but achieve the same clocking and verification authenticity, with added mobility. |
| From Environmental Concerns to Environmental Involvement |
| As part of the efforts for environmental-concerns, in 2018, we introduced an innovative service, i-Environ that runs by a group of passionate research scientists is a service that downsizes the high-cost environmental analytical service to an affordable level for normal communities to subscribe even in regular basis. The i-Environ services deploy drone technology at the front-end, with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence technology at the back-end, integrated as part of the i-Neighbour Smart Community services for community to have firsthand access to relevant and important environmental information about their neighbourhood. |
| Near Field Commerce |
| The rise of e-Commerce that boost the logistic industry, normally tags along with two environmental problems, firstly the carbon emission problem, and secondly the waste of extra packaging. We are promoting the Near Field Commerce or Community Commerce to build a more environmental-friendly community compared with online commerce or online to offline commerce in general. One of the problems of the existing e-Commerce is, when you purchase multiple items from one eCommerce platform, it might get split into multiple deliveries, that exaggerate carbon emission and packaging wastage problems. But none of these problems exists for the nearby commerce. Even for a group-buy platform like Groupon, it groups all the purchases from individuals to enjoy volume purchase discounts for tangible products. But, when it comes to delivery, it is still done in multiple. In most of the e-Commerce platforms, customers are always treated as separate individuals; while in Near Field Commerce, it targets individuals in the community rather than sporadic individuals from everywhere.
When a commerce platform targets a community, it can achieve 'Multiple Purchases, One Delivery', be it to a workplace or to a residential community. TimeTec has Tenant App for business towers, and iNeighbour App for a residential community built-in with commerce platform that consists of three components namely i-Merchants for merchant listing, TimeTec Mart for online purchase including community group buy feature, and i-Ad for merchants to advertise and boost their sales. TimeTec has filed 4 patents to promote environmental friendly Near Field Commerce, and as part of our digital building ecosystem for commercial or residential buildings. |
