Green policy 🌱

Our commitment to sustainable operations in data & AI consulting

At Plainsight, sustainability is embedded in how we operate, deliver, and grow. As a data & AI consulting organisation, we recognise that our environmental impact extends beyond office walls into the digital infrastructure we design and the advisory services we provide. This policy outlines the concrete measures we have put in place to minimise our ecological footprint and promote responsible business practices.

Sustainable People & Mobility Policy

We actively reduce the environmental impact of commuting and business travel through a comprehensive, structured approach to mobility:

•        Mobility budget first: We strongly encourage every employee to opt for a mobility budget rather than a company car. Through our partnership with the Olympus Mobility platform, employees manage their own budget across three pillars: a low-emission or electric vehicle, sustainable transport and housing costs, and a cash balance. This gives our people the flexibility to choose public transport, shared mobility, bicycles, or a combination — resulting in significantly lower emissions.

•        Strict CO₂ cap with a path to zero: When an employee does choose a company car under Pillar 1, it must not exceed 95 g CO₂/km, with each successive car required to have lower emissions than the last — driving the fleet progressively toward fully electric. We mandate fully electric vehicles as the default when a company car is genuinely required, eliminating direct tailpipe emissions.

•        Sustainable transport options built in: Pillar 2 of the mobility budget explicitly covers bicycles, e-bikes, e-steps, public transport subscriptions (De Lijn, MIVB and equivalents abroad), shared cars, and shared micro-mobility. Employees can also use their budget toward rent or mortgage payments for housing closer to their workplace, reducing commute distances at the source.

•        Charging infrastructure support: We facilitate the installation of home charging stations for employees with electric vehicles and provide access to an extensive public charging network through our charging card programme.

•        Remote and hybrid working: We default to remote or hybrid work wherever possible. Workshops and meetings are held digitally unless physical presence adds clear value. When on-site work is needed, we cluster on-site days to reduce the total number of commutes.

Green Office & Operations

Our day-to-day operations follow sustainable principles across every touchpoint:

•        Digital-first document management: We operate an essentially paperless office. All contracts, reports, internal documentation, and our company playbook are handled digitally. Our entire organizational playbook is open-source and hosted on GitHub, eliminating the need for printed handbooks or manuals and ensuring everyone always has access to the latest version.

•        Sustainable procurement: We prioritise suppliers and partners that demonstrate strong environmental credentials. When purchasing hardware or office supplies, we favour energy-efficient, recycled, or sustainably sourced products.

•        Energy-efficient workspace: Our office spaces use LED lighting, smart climate control, and energy-monitoring systems. We select co-working or office locations that hold recognised energy performance certifications wherever possible.

•        Waste reduction and sorting: We maintain strict waste separation in our offices and actively minimise single-use materials. We provide reusable alternatives for catering at events and meetings.

•        Responsible hardware lifecycle: We extend the useful life of laptops and equipment through proper maintenance, and ensure end-of-life hardware is recycled or donated through certified e-waste partners.

ESG Expertise Across Projects

We leverage our data and analytics capabilities to help organisations achieve their own sustainability goals:

•        ESG reporting and modelling: We have hands-on experience building ESG reporting frameworks that model and track relevant sustainability KPIs, including energy consumption, mobility patterns, procurement impact, supplier assessments, and waste streams where data is available.

•        Auditability and traceability: We design our reporting solutions with consistent definitions, transparent methodologies, and full traceability so that sustainability data is reliable for both internal decision-making and external disclosure requirements such as CSRD.

•        Carbon footprint analytics: We develop dashboards and data products that give our clients real-time visibility into their carbon emissions across scopes 1, 2, and 3, enabling targeted reduction strategies.

•        Sustainability data strategy: We advise clients on embedding sustainability metrics into their core data architecture, ensuring ESG considerations are not an afterthought but an integral part of their data ecosystem.

Sustainable Data & Cloud Design

As a data & AI consultancy, a significant part of our environmental responsibility lies in how we design digital solutions. We apply green engineering principles across every project, many of which are codified in our public technical playbook:

•        Right-sizing and FinOps by design: We align cloud capacity and workloads to actual demand. Our Fabric Capacity Management guidelines prescribe a structured Size → Split → Optimise → Monitor cycle, ensuring capacities are selected based on real workload profiles, not overprovisioned defaults. We conduct periodic optimisation reviews to ensure resources remain appropriately sized.

•        No idle environments: Our best practices explicitly prohibit leaving development and test capacities running around the clock. We use scheduled scaling and automation via REST APIs to pause or downscale non-production environments outside working hours, eliminating wasted energy on idle infrastructure.

•        Efficient data pipelines: We build incremental and event-driven data loads instead of full-refresh patterns. We apply early filtering and aggregation to reduce the volume of data processed, and we avoid unnecessary reprocessing of datasets. These patterns are embedded in our architectural principles and Lakeflow ETL guidelines.

•        Lifecycle management and data retention: We implement tiered storage strategies, archiving cold data to lower-energy storage tiers. Retention policies are aligned with actual business use through our medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold layers), preventing uncontrolled storage growth.

•        Controlled sandbox environments: We provide every employee with access to a shared Azure sandbox for experimentation, with resource tagging to track usage. Personal sandboxes are capped at $150 per month through Visual Studio Enterprise licences, ensuring experimentation happens within bounded resource envelopes rather than unconstrained cloud sprawl.

•        Green cloud region selection: When choosing cloud regions, we factor in the carbon intensity of the local energy grid. We preferentially deploy workloads in regions powered by a higher share of renewable energy.

•        Model efficiency and responsible AI compute: We favour efficient model architectures and techniques such as model distillation, quantisation, and transfer learning to minimise the computational cost of AI training and inference. We avoid unnecessarily large models when smaller alternatives deliver equivalent performance.

•        Serverless and auto-scaling architectures: We design solutions using serverless and auto-scaling patterns that consume compute resources only when actively processing, eliminating idle resource waste.

•        Monitoring and reporting of cloud carbon footprint: We track the energy consumption and carbon emissions of our cloud environments using provider-native sustainability tools (such as the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics App and Azure carbon dashboards) and feed these insights back into our optimisation cycle

Awareness, Culture & Continuous Improvement

Sustainability is a shared responsibility. We foster a culture of ecological awareness throughout the organisation, supported by the same transparency and knowledge-sharing principles that define all of Plainsight:

•        Open knowledge sharing across the ecosystem: We actively participate in and contribute to industry communities such as DataMinds, Fabric Belgium, and Generative AI Belgium. Through these communities, we share green data engineering practices and sustainability learnings beyond our own organisation, helping to reduce duplicated effort and raise the bar across the industry.

•        Open-source playbook: Our company playbook — including our technical guidelines on capacity management, efficient pipeline design, and compute optimisation — is published as open source on GitHub. This means our green engineering best practices are freely available for others to adopt, amplifying our sustainability impact beyond our own projects.

•        Green champions network: We have designated sustainability ambassadors within the team who champion green initiatives, gather improvement ideas, and help translate policy into everyday practice.

•        Annual sustainability review: We conduct a yearly review of our environmental performance, assessing progress against targets and identifying new opportunities for impact reduction.

•        Client engagement on sustainability: We proactively discuss sustainability considerations with our clients during project scoping and design phases, advocating for greener solutions even when not explicitly requested.

•        Experimentation budget for green innovation: Each employee receives a yearly experimentation budget that can be used toward tools, subscriptions, and resources that support sustainable innovation, from energy-efficient coding tools to sustainability-focused learning platforms.

Changes to Our green policy 🌱

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our data collection and usage practices. We encourage you to review this policy periodically to stay informed about how we are protecting your personal information.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy or the way we handle your personal information, please contact us at info@plainsight.pro.