Jodie Voller talks to Head of Marketing Kirstin Monk to explain how Biotecture are bringing sustainability to the top of our agenda.
KM: Congratulations on your promotion to Sustainability Director. What will your new role involve and what will your initial focus be?
JV: We are a green company, our products contribute in so many positive ways to the environmental issues we are facing today by reducing pollutants, reducing urban temperatures, and increasing biodiversity. Our living walls give our clients the chance to take full advantage of nature, even in an urban environment, helping reduce stress, improve wellbeing and productivity. As Sustainability Director I will ensure we ‘practice what we preach’ in a sense that we are truly sustainable, not only in our products, but also across our operations. Biotecture’s ethos has always been towards recycled materials and to minimise our negative impact, and I will embed this further, making improvements to our internal processes and working closely with our supply chain to ensure we’re the best we can be!
KM: What does sustainability mean to you?
JV: To me, being a sustainable company in the simplest of terms means delivering our products and services responsibly, and in doing so, not depleting or harming the environment or people, without compromising future generations, leaving the world a better place than we found it.
I will be taking an honest inward look at the company and assessing the impact we have, both positive and negative, and the responsibility we have to improve wherever possible. Although predominantly this will be environmental impacts, it also includes governance, our employees, our impact on the community and on our customers.
KM: You joined Biotecture in 2016, how has your role has evolved over time?
JV: A chance encounter with Biotecture’s Managing Director, Richard introduced me to an industry I didn’t even know existed and the rest as they say is history! I started working in Operations support. I remotely monitored the living walls irrigation systems and organised all of the logistics, permits, machinery etc to get the maintenance teams onsite. As the company grew, I moved into the Operations Manager role, which mainly involved the contractual side of the maintenance department. I carried out renewals, quotations, invoicing and budgeting for the department.
I also managed my amazing team who work hard arranging around 400+ maintenance visits per year to over 130 living walls across the country and monitoring their irrigation every day!
During my day to day, I was always keen to try and improve processes and streamline our working to allow better efficiency, but also to reduce our impact on the environment. Now I have been given the great opportunity of being Sustainability Director and I look forward to driving this forward.
KM: What do you enjoy most about working at Biotecture?
JV: Most definitely the people, you will not meet a more diverse group of people all so passionate about the same goal! The passion for what we do is tangible in everyone and it’s great to be a part of. I also enjoy being in a company that still has that small family feel.
I also enjoy the fact that I can get involved in many different areas of the business which keeps things interesting!
