Security and sustainability must now go hand-in-hand, which requires that today’s technology solutions not only mitigate threat vulnerabilities but also help reduce environmental impacts.
More than ever, end users want footprint transparency from their security solution suppliers. This includes information ranging from their operations and product sourcing to research and development practices. Integrators and installers also consider sustainability when making partnering decisions. In addition to addressing these sustainability transparency requirements, the security industry has innovated new ways to use access-control and identity-management solutions for building-usage analytics and related applications, which has turned them into important tools to fight against climate change.
Embracing environmental stewardship
HID’s 2023 State of Security and Identity Industry Report revealed how important sustainability has become to its partners, end users and security and IT personnel across a range of titles, organizations and industries. More than 90 percent of approximately 2,700 total respondents in HID’s March 2023 report cited sustainability as an important issue. Among integrators and installers, 76 percent of respondents said their customers believe sustainability is increasingly important, and 62 percent said it is “very important” or “extremely” important to their customers.
These results echo the growing global consensus that governments, organizations and individuals must take more action to address environmental concerns. Still, looking to access-control and identity-management solutions for big global sustainability breakthroughs may seem counterintuitive since most of the world’s attention has generally been focused on the transportation and energy sectors. On the contrary, today’s solutions are quietly delivering unique and powerful ways to help solve some of the world’s biggest environmental challenges.
How the security industry helps drive sustainability
Security teams support environmental initiatives through a combination of close attention to their own environmental footprint and sustainability-based product development. Additionally, the industry is also moving entire identity-management processes to the cloud to further reduce waste and minimize energy and resource usage, while also assuming an increasingly important role in supporting the data-gathering requirements of compliance reporting. Following is a look at the four major ways the industry is attacking the sustainability challenge.
#1: Improving supplier sustainability
Suppliers are firmly embedding sustainability into their day-to-day operations to reduce their own overall environmental footprint. A key priority is to take a “sustainability-by-design” approach when considering real estate acquisitions and lease renewals. This enables organizations to reduce the carbon footprint, coordinate the implementation of environmental management systems, enhance data analysis and benchmarking, cut energy consumption and increase the proportion of renewable energy.
The same sustainability considerations should extend to the organization’s supply chain, as well. Other recommended measures include environmental risk management in accordance with the ISO 14001 environmental management system and regulatory compliance using rigorous monitoring and reporting processes with a quick response to compliance breaches.
#2: Improving product sustainability
Security solution suppliers are taking a strategic approach to developing new products and solutions that address sensible energy usage, waste reduction and resource optimization. A few examples include:
-- ID cards made from sustainably sourced bamboo
-- RFID readers with a power-saving mode and streamlined manufacturing to save energy. These readers also clip parts together rather than using the typical epoxy-potting component-binding approach to make end-of-life recycling of electronics more practical.
-- Card printers that use a “color-on-demand” inkjet approach that eliminates the waste problem of ribbon panels used with more traditional dye-sublimation techniques.
To create these and other offerings, suppliers are integrating sustainability directly into their product development process while also providing customers and partners with information about design criteria ranging from raw materials, packaging, recycled content and end-of-life reusability to recyclability, in-life energy consumption, carbon footprint, and financial cost.
Some suppliers complete GreenCircle certifications for readers, printer lines, and other products and also provide Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) that help customers reach their own sustainability targets. EPDs are particularly relevant to the building materials industry. They can play a key role in helping companies define their emissions baseline, pinpoint hotspots throughout the value chain, and provide building blocks of an actionable decarbonization strategy within the context of today’s evolving financial and regulatory landscape.
In many cases, the purchasing decision and path to achieve LEEDv41 and other certifications are based on information from EPDs. These declarations provide the information needed to assess embodied carbon levels in building materials, and also contain what is called a life cycle assessment, or LCA, for understanding the sustainability impact and footprint of products during their lifetime.
#3: Moving to mobile IDs and the cloud
Organizations are increasingly opting for mobile credentials to eliminate or decrease their use of plastic cards. These credentials also improve convenience and, because mobile devices are constantly connected, can be issued, managed and revoked over the air, saving time for both security staff and human resources.
While these IDs will never fully replace physical ID cards, especially in hospitals and other places where it is essential to see a visible card on a clip or lanyard, even their co-existence with physical cards will at least reduce what has become hundreds of millions of plastic cards sold annually. Each weighs 5 grams and has a carbon footprint of 21 grams, equating to plastic waste of 2,700 tons and an overall carbon footprint of 11,400 tons. The move to bamboo cards will also help reduce this waste and footprint problem.
Further resource reduction is possible by moving processes to the cloud like secure printing, enabling organizations to control what can be printed, reduce consumables usage, and streamline card issuance through web-based alternatives to visiting a card office. Access control is also moving to the cloud, leveraging the Internet of Things so that organizations can use connected architectures, multi-applications and mobile devices to deliver seamless experiences while simplifying complexities, optimizing processes, and reducing resources. Adding location services to these systems also helps advance the sustainability cause by providing real-time, actionable occupancy data for process optimization.
When these access control systems are integrated with building automation systems, there are even more opportunities to improve sustainability. This is a significant trend as energy management and building automation systems increasingly combine heating and cooling, access control, lighting, and other sensors. These systems reduce energy consumption based on building usage and how services like HVAC and lighting can be adjusted for energy efficiency and cost savings.
HID data from its 2022 State of Physical Access Control report validates this sustainability trend. It showed that the most common way to monitor occupancy data for optimizing efficiency and making better-informed building-usage decisions is through the organization’s access control system. Forty-two percent of respondents used these systems to understand employee occupancy so they could evaluate office space needs, ensure desk space was available when needed, and determine how best to manage hybrid work demands. Thirty-four percent used these systems to understand visitor occupancy.
#4: Streamlining sustainability compliance
Another benefit of combining cloud-based access control with location-services capabilities is data it generates can also be used to help streamline and improve the accuracy of sustainability compliance monitoring and reporting. In fact, access control solution suppliers often partner with specialist certification companies to help outline best practices for meeting sustainability scoring goals.
There are many types of specialist certification companies that provide scores on how “green” buildings and other properties are. Key examples include LEED, which is the internationally accepted benchmark for green buildings, which recognizes a company’s efforts to divert waste from a landfill through increased reuse, recycling or recovery efforts. The GreenCircle program to which security product suppliers often certify their products provides independent, third-party validation and documentation for sustainability claims.
Significant attention will continue to be placed on the health and wellness of a building’s tenants with programs such as WELL, Fitwel, and the Living Building Challenge. The building’s footprint will also be a big consideration, especially with the push for Zero Net Energy. Building resiliency will also come into view, given climate change and natural disasters.
Access-control and identity-management solutions, combined with location services, will play an increasingly pivotal role in generating data for these and other programs. They will enable organizations to more effectively define and report on a clear sustainability strategy that positions them to adapt to, as well as anticipate, a variety of environmental, social and regulatory changes, both in the short- and long-term.
No silver bullet
There is no silver bullet for “cleaning up” any industry, including the security industry. But a combination of cloud, mobile and IoT innovations have made secure access solutions more connected and convenient, and this has important implications for the availability of building-usage data. Not only is the security industry better equipped than many other sectors to improve its own sustainability, but also that of any organization that depends on efficient and reliable building-usage data for their sustainability initiatives and compliance-certification reporting.
As with all industries, sustainability in the security industry is an investment in the future of the environment. But it is also an investment in more efficient, longer-lasting products, an investment in customers’ certification success, and an investment in resiliency at a critical time when protecting the planet has growing cultural relevancy and, often, a direct impact on business continuity.
Travis Hensley is Global Sustainability, Health and Safety Manager at HID, a maker of software and hardware to secure building and property access globally. He spearheads the people and process-centric sustainability strategies for the company's operations at HID. With over two decades of experience in operations, including serving as a lead auditor for ISO 9001 (Quality Management) and ISO 14001 (Environmental Management), Hensley is committed to safeguarding natural habitats and driving positive behaviors that promote the well-being of the planet and people, and being an ambassador of change.