Inaugural Supplier Sustainability Forum

Virgin Media has committed to achieving five bold sustainability goals by 2020. Two of these keep us focused on improving the sustainability performance of every new customer product and growing our business without increasing our carbon footprint.

We work in partnership with all of our suppliers, but achieving these two goals in particular requires close collaboration with suppliers who specifically build and manage our physical infrastructure, network and customer products.

That’s why this week we hosted six of our key Design, Build and Deploy suppliers at our Big Red Shed for our inaugural Supplier Sustainability Forum.

This was the first time our partners have come together to explore ways to collaborate and ultimately support Virgin Media to deliver our 5 in 5 sustainability goals. Working with these particular partners will enable us to further improve energy efficiencies and waste reduction across our technical estate.

We chose to kick off our inaugural Supplier Sustainability Forum with our Design, Build and Deploy partners because a huge focus for Virgin Media right now is our £3 billion Lightning expansion programme which will see us connect an additional 4 million premises by 2019. The programme involves the rapid expansion of our physical network. Our Design, Build and Deploy partners play a crucial role in delivering this.

The performance of our technical estate is central to our ability to achieve our Lower impact goal; to grow our business without increasing our carbon footprint - emissions from electricity consumption make up 88% of our scope 1 and 2 footprint with the majority of this consumption coming from the technical estate.

Suppliers came with ideas for how they could best support the delivery of Virgin Media’s goals. Another key focus for the day was identifying opportunities for improvement and collaboration.  The areas identified included; the way Virgin Media uses processes, systems and tools as along with how expectations are set and performance reviewed. We will continue working with these six suppliers to drive improvements in these areas together.