Our Sustainability Policy

In 2024, we prepared our Sustainability Policy, which lists our ongoing and planned sustainability initiatives and describes the various aspects of our operations that have the greatest environmental impact when providing services to our clients’ archives. We believe this is important for us and our clients. Our archiving and document destruction practices and processes allow us to achieve the highest levels of recyclability. This is an important commitment to safety, quality of service and sustainability that we pledge to maintain. The Sustainability Policy is the starting point for what we do and what we plan to do in this regard. Future goal: to have an annual Sustainability Report and to rate ourselves against the National Sustainability Index.

Sustainable management of the paper archive

Although we constantly hear in the public discourse that paper is an absolute evil and the enemy of sustainability, we respect the different processes and needs of our clients, i.e. companies from a wide range of industries, and the legal regulation of their areas. Although electronic documents and signatures have been legalised in Lithuania for over 10 years, the transition from paper to electronic documents has been gradual, businesses are calculating and prudently assessing the risks, costs, business continuity, potential legal liability and GDPR risks, and deciding individually on the form and storage location of their documents. Even highly digital businesses (e.g. e-shops) with physical interactions with individuals (e.g. pick-up points) print documents and obtain physical signatures from customers.

In the face of cyber threats, where any cloud storage can be hacked and all data/documents lost, having a backup physical hard copy of a document in a remote archive is an excellent insurance policy and business continuity protector. In the US, a pioneer in cloud services and document management software, many businesses digitise or store and work with electronic or digitised documents, but place hard copies in remote commercial archives as insurance or protection in the event of electronic data loss.

Sustainability is the responsible archiving of documents, storing them only for as long as is mandatory or necessary, and disposing of them in a way that leaves minimal impact on the environment and maximises reuse or recycling.

Sustainable archiving solutions include: re-stapling documents from expensive office binders to archival media and reclaiming the binders for use in new documents; organising files by year and retention period into bins, so that the entire bin is destroyed at the time of disposal and the number of years stored is reduced.

Sustainable solutions for archive storage: outsourcing the storage of company archives to our specialised storage facility saves heating space in offices/client premises. By storing in a large archive centre, the heating and environmental impact of the client’s archive is reduced. We already started to use renewable energy sources for climate controls of part of our storage facilities.

Sustainable solutions for archive destruction: documents are prepared for destruction by manually separating paper from plastic and metal and other impurities used for archiving. This ensures that the maximum amount of paper from archive documents is shredded and recycled. All sorted materials are sent for recycling. All materials still suitable for archiving are reused.