Environmental savings from our digitisation strategies 

At Capital Space, one of our commitments is to reduce our impact on the planet as much as we can. So, we’re delighted to sign off for Christmas with some good news about the environmental savings from one of our digitisation strategies.  

Why we introduced e-signatures and digital identity verification 

With nearly 700 SME customers across nine business and seedbed centres in Kent, Essex, Surrey and Buckinghamshire, traditional ways of producing and signing contracts create a lot of paper and admin, including sending contracts by posts and waiting for prospective customers to return them, as well as having to ask them to come back to their chosen business centre with their proof of identity. Not only was this system inefficient, time consuming and costly, it also came with a big environmental footprint.  

Matt Roberts, Senior Centre Manager at Milton Keynes Business Centre, who has led on digitisation of business processes across Capital Space, evaluated e-signature platforms at the end of 2019. We opted for Docusign as a platform that would help us seamlessly populate and process our flexible monthly license agreements quickly, ensure that the correct documents are sent to the right customers and verify prospective customers’ identities, without the need for them to come back to show them to our various Reception teams.  

We rolled out Docusign across all nine of our business and seedbed centres in February 2020 – just before the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The environmental savings resulting from Docusign  

Our latest statistics show significant environmental savings across the last three years of using Docusign. Over 2023, 2024 and 2025, we have:  

• Reduced our carbon emissions by 10,442lb 

• Saved 13,099 gallons of water  

• Saved 4,448lb of wood  

• Saved 35,094 pages of A4 paper – the equivalent of 13 trees   

“Moving to an e-signature and digital ID verification system has improved both internal processes and customer experiences – they no longer have to find envelopes and stamps to send contracts back to us, and they no longer have to come into their chosen business centre with their proof of identity,” explains Matt.  

“But equally as importantly, it has aligned with one of our core Capital Space values of helping us to reduce our impact on the planet, as set out in our Green Policy,” he adds. “This is a constant work in progress, which is why we continue to monitor our practices and our chosen providers to ensure that we are doing everything we can to improve our carbon footprint by reducing, reusing and recycling wherever possible, and by adopting best practise technologies.”  

Docusign is just one of the ways in which we look to reduce our environmental impact, and in so doing to support the ESG policies of our customers.  

If you’re looking for office space from a provider that cares about the environment, get in touch.