Overview
We want to heighten environmental awareness and responsibility amongst our colleagues, audiences and societies. We aim to do this through our platforms, collaborations and partnerships.
When it comes to our business, we apply the precautionary principle when assessing the environmental and health impacts of our operations. We don’t operate any businesses in Sweden that require separate environmental reporting or licensing. However, we report on and monitor our carbon footprint and energy consumption to help us minimise our impact. As most of our emissions come from air travel, we encourage our employees to travel smarter while offering tools that enable them to travel less. It’s also important to us that we work with responsible suppliers. This is why our pay-TV business Viasat, for example, ensures that its set-top boxes are free of conflict minerals.
The integration of our gaming and esports companies is still a work in progress, as it adds a new dimension to our environmental work. Because our esports companies produce live events and festivals on a global scale, it is our ambition to integrate these activities into our future environmental strategy and reporting.
Our environmental work
At MTG, we keep track of our carbon footprint and encourage everyone across all our businesses to think and act green. We want our offices to be as energy efficient as possible, while we aim to provide our people with tools that reduce unnecessary travel.
In 2018, our overall energy consumption decreased by 22%. The main factor here is the exclusion of energy-intensive entities, such as our divested Baltic operations from the data. In addition, meter readings in our Stockholm office have been improved (and in some cases corrected).
Our overall carbon footprint during 2018 was 25,215 tonnes CO2e, which is a year on year increase of 7%. About 84% of MTG’s emissions during 2018 arose from business travel, with air travel representing 76% of total emissions. Most of the remaining emissions came from energy use in our facilities. We are a very travel intensive company, especially our esports businesses that operate events across the world. These companies stood for 68% of our total travel emissions during 2018.
We currently do not measure the carbon footprint of our events and festivals but are looking into ways to do this efficiently. On a positive note, DreamHack asks its venues if they have environmental certification, although this is not a prerequisite for hosting their events. In addition, local Scouts and sports club members, who volunteer at DreamHack festivals in Sweden, can keep deposit money from collected PET bottles and cans.
In Sweden, we continue to work towards reducing MTG’s energy consumption to meet the 20% reduction target set by the European Union’s Energy Efficiency Directive. Many small activities add up to a bigger contribution, which is why we are optimising the indoor climate in our main office in Stockholm. This creates a better work environment and saves energy too. During 2019, all lights in the building will be exchanged for LED lights, and we will continue to explore the possibility of recycling our office heat (especially from our server rooms) and feeding it back into local heating grids.
Our overall aim is to travel smarter as well as less, and to use tools that enable an equally efficient working experience. Travelling smarter means booking flights with fewer stops, combining destinations in a single trip, using the train rather than flying, and renting only hybrid or electric cars. Everyone needs to take responsibility for our footprint!
