Our Commitment to the Environment

We are committed to manage our environmental footprint and provide opportunities to help advance environmental protection. Our commitment involves actions focused on mitigating our carbon emission, managing consumption of natural resources such as water, enhancing our waste management practices and engaging partners across our value chain to build resilience to climate change.

Our Contribution to Climate Change

             

To realise our long-term goal of Net Zero Emissions by 2050, we took considerable strides in implementing our carbon reduction strategy. A key component of our effort includes partnering with EcoNinja on the Greening Malaysia Programme 2021-2025 to sequester carbon through tree planting. Approximately 300 trees and 50 m2 of coral reefs were planted in FY2021, with our offset performance tracked through EcoNinja.

Biodiversity Impact Programme in collaboration with Urban Hijau – Kelulut Stingless Bees Beekeeper Workshop

Biodiversity decline and ecosystem collapse stand out as the fastest deteriorating global risks over the next decade, as highlighted in the Global Risk Report 2023 by the World Economic Forum. At GHL, we embrace biodiversity through educational program on the pollination of the kelulut stingless bees in collaboration with experts from Urban Hijau. This workshop is to educate our employees on the importance of biodiversity to the ecosystem and understanding how sustainability is closely linked to biodiversity.

               
           


Transition to Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services ("AWS")

Our digital services are reliant on energy consumption, which constitutes the vast majority of our operational greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions. In year 2022, we commenced transition of our processing platforms and applications from on-premise data centres to cloud-based solutions via Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). This transition is well in line with our climate efforts as cloud computing is more energy efficient. Additionally, AWS has further committed to renewable energy purchases to power its cloud servers, reducing our operations’ dependence on fuel-based grid electricity.






Photovoltaic solar panels installed at our headquarters’ office building in 2022 is a pilot initiative to increase renewable energy generation and to decrease our reliance on grid electricity. We hope to expand this initiative across the Group in the coming years.


In our efforts to reduce overall energy consumption, employees at GHL practices hybrid work arrangements. Hybrid work arrangements at GHL encourages employees to work from home 2 days per week, subjected to Head of Departments and/or person-in-charge’s approval. This arrangement resulted to a further reduction of our Scope 2 GHG Emission, which can be seen as follows:


             


         


Waste Management

The majority of our waste generation results from Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines operations. The primary waste recorded are electronic waste (“e-waste”) from obsolete terminals that can no longer be used in our operations. Our formal company procedure is to ensure obsolete terminals are disposed of in a responsible manner.

We recognise that partnership with specialised waste disposal authority is crucial to the safe transportation and disposal of hazardous waste. In the year 2023, we continue to collaborate with Trashcycle to ensure proper waste management. Across our regional footprint, qualified contractors and agencies are appointed for the management and recovery of e-waste, in alignment to each country’s regulation and industry best practices. The collected e-waste will be shredded and utilised in concrete mixture to serve as a partial replacement to coarse aggregates.

The amount of office waste generated by GHL was negligible in FY2023 as most of our operations were conducted online. This is compounded by our hybrid-working arrangement where domestic office waste is further reduced compared to previous years.

Water Stewardship

Water is primarily used as cooling agent in our servers and for domestic use in our office buildings. We remain cognizant of the issue of water security in water scarce regions such as Australia. The Group’s water-related risks are negligible as the size of our Australia operations is minimal, and our other operations are not located in water stressed regions.

Our annual water consumption is tracked across our office building in all countries we operate in. In FY2023, the Group’s total water consumption amounted to 6,221 m3. The figure has increased, as most of our employees are back to office at maximum capacity.