Sustainability used to appear in security tenders as a paragraph near the end that nobody scored. That has changed. Main contractors now carry environmental reporting obligations down the supply chain, and a security provider is part of that chain: our vehicles run on your site, our equipment draws power from your supply, and our reporting either adds to your paperwork or reduces it.
This is an account of where the environmental impact of site security actually sits, what we do about it, and what we deliberately do not claim. The last part matters. Security is a sector with a long history of overstating credentials, and an unverifiable environmental claim is no better than an unverifiable accreditation.
Where the footprint actually is
It is worth being clear about proportions before describing initiatives, because it is easy to make a great deal of a small thing.
For a manned guarding and patrol business, the dominant impact is vehicle movement. Officers travelling to and from site, and mobile patrol vehicles covering a round overnight, account for far more than anything else we do. After that comes the power drawn by equipment left running continuously on site: cameras, lighting and the heating in a welfare unit occupied through a winter night. Everything else, including paper, is marginal by comparison.
So the measures that count are the ones that reduce miles driven and power drawn. The rest is worth doing and not worth boasting about.
Patrol routing and scheduling
A mobile patrol round is a routing problem. The same set of sites visited in a poorly ordered sequence can involve substantially more driving than the same visits ordered sensibly, and the difference compounds every night of a contract.
We plan rounds by geography rather than by the order contracts were won, and we use tracking data to check that the planned route is the route actually driven. There is a security benefit that pulls in the same direction as the environmental one: visits need to be at irregular times so they cannot be predicted by anyone watching, but irregular timing does not require inefficient routing. Randomising the hour is what matters, not randomising the road.
Clustering also affects who we take on, though the reason is operational before it is environmental. Where we already cover several sites in an area we have officers who know the roads, the access constraints and the people, and who can be on site quickly when something happens. That local resource and local knowledge is what makes the cover good. Where a site sits well outside anywhere we hold that, the honest answer is sometimes that a provider with people on the ground nearby will serve it better than we would, or that the site is better suited to a static officer or to remote monitoring. Fewer miles is a consequence of getting that right rather than the reason for it.
Choosing the lowest-impact option that actually works
The largest reduction available on most contracts is not a greener version of the same service. It is specifying the right service in the first place.
Remotely monitored CCTV involves no nightly travel at all once installed. For a site with a defined perimeter, adequate power and a clear view of the approaches, it can provide better coverage than a patrol that visits four times a night, at a fraction of the vehicle movement. It also has real limits, and it is worth stating them plainly: cameras cannot intervene, they depend on a response arrangement to mean anything, and they are poorly suited to sites with heavy vegetation, complex sightlines or constant legitimate movement.
Conversely, a permanent static officer involves two journeys per shift and nothing more, which for a high-risk site is often both the most effective option and a lower-impact one than repeated patrol visits. The wrong answer environmentally is usually the one that is also the wrong answer operationally: a patrol frequency set by habit rather than by the risk on that particular site.
We would rather have that conversation at specification stage than supply a rolling patrol contract that neither party has looked at in two years.
Power drawn on site
Equipment left running continuously is the second lever. Where site conditions suit it, solar and battery-backed camera and lighting units remove the draw on the site supply or a generator entirely, and on a site without a mains connection during enabling works they can remove a fuel delivery as well. Where conditions do not suit it, through shading, orientation or the power demands of the equipment, we say so rather than specifying something that will need a generator behind it by November.
Lighting is more straightforward. LED units on timers or sensors, aimed at the approaches rather than flooding the whole site, reduce consumption and light spill together, which tends to matter to neighbours and to planning conditions as much as to carbon.
Welfare accommodation is the one people forget. A cabin heated all night for one officer, with a door that does not seal and single glazing, will use more energy over a winter than everything else on this list combined. Specifying a reasonably insulated unit, sized for the number of people actually using it, does more than any number of smaller measures.
Reporting without paper
Patrol logs, incident reports, visitor records and handover notes are all digital, timestamped and available to the client directly. The paper saving is genuinely marginal in environmental terms and we would not present it otherwise. The reason we do it is evidential: a record that exists in one place, cannot be reconstructed afterwards, and can be produced for an audit or an insurer is worth considerably more than a book in a cabin. The environmental benefit is a by-product.
ISO 14001, and what it does and does not mean
Andor Group holds ISO 14001, alongside ISO 9001 and ISO 45001. It is worth being precise about what that certification is, because it is often cited as though it were an environmental score.
ISO 14001 certifies an environmental management system. It means we have identified our environmental impacts, set objectives against them, and are audited on whether we follow our own process and improve against our own baseline. It does not certify that our footprint is small, and it does not mean we have compared favourably against anyone else. What it does give a client is assurance that there is a system rather than a set of intentions, and that an external auditor tests it.
For a main contractor collecting environmental data across a supply chain, that distinction is the useful one.
What we do not claim
We do not claim to be carbon neutral or net zero, and we have not purchased offsets in order to describe ourselves that way. We have not published a dated net zero commitment, and we would rather not until we can show the workings behind it. We do not claim a percentage reduction in emissions, because we are not yet measuring to a standard that would make such a figure meaningful, and a number without a method behind it is marketing.
What we do claim is the certification above, the operational practices described here, and a willingness to be specific when asked.
Questions worth asking any security supplier
If you are assessing providers on environmental grounds, most of the useful questions are operational rather than aspirational:
- How many sites are on the patrol round that will cover ours, and where are they?
- Is the patrol frequency set by our risk assessment, or by a standard contract?
- Would remote monitoring cover this site, and if not, why not?
- Who supplies and specifies the welfare unit for out-of-hours cover?
- Is the environmental management system certified, and by whom?
- What reporting comes to us, and in what form?
A provider who can answer those specifically is doing something. One who answers with a commitment to the planet is not.
Talking it through
If you are putting together a tender return that needs supply chain environmental information, or specifying security for a site where the right answer is not obvious, we are happy to go through it. You can see our full range of construction site security services, or contact us on 020 4602 3974 or at sales@andorgroup.com.