How AV Design Can Improve Your ESG Strategy (and Your EcoVadis Score)

Your AV systems are quietly affecting your ESG performance — and most organisations can't prove what impact they're having. Here's how to change that, and why it matters for your EcoVadis score.

Georgina Austin-Smith | Updated 2026

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ESG reporting has moved from voluntary good practice to commercial expectation. Investors, clients, and procurement teams are scrutinising the detail — not just the headline commitments.

Most organisations are making progress on the obvious metrics: energy consumption, real estate footprint, supply chain transparency. These are measurable, reportable, and relatively well understood.

What tends to fall through the gap are the systems embedded within the workplace itself. Audio-visual technology is a prime example. It's consuming energy, influencing user behaviour, and driving procurement decisions — but it's almost never considered as part of an ESG strategy.

That's a problem. Not because AV is the most significant ESG factor in your organisation, but because it's increasingly one of the ones you can't evidence.

The Gap Between - ESG Intent and Evidence

Frameworks like EcoVadis aren't scored on ambition. They assess structure, transparency, and demonstrated improvement.

Many organisations are now specifying more energy-efficient AV systems, selecting manufacturers with stronger environmental credentials, and adopting sustainable procurement policies. All of that is positive.

But when it comes to demonstrating what those systems actually deliver — how they perform in practice, how efficiently they're being used, what their real-world energy profile looks like — most organisations struggle to provide meaningful data.

Intent is there. Evidence is not.

ACTION STEP: Review your current ESG reporting: can you provide utilisation or energy data for your AV estate? If not, that's a gap worth addressing before your next assessment cycle.

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Sustainability Is Decided at Design Stage — But Proved Much Later

The most significant ESG decisions in AV happen before a single piece of equipment is installed. Product choices matter — low-power displays, efficient processing units, manufacturers with strong environmental credentials.

But the bigger decisions are structural:

• Are your environments standardised, or are you running a fragmented estate that's expensive to manage and harder to report on?

• Can systems be upgraded incrementally, or does improvement require full replacement?

• Is lifecycle considered at design stage, or are you optimising for day-one performance at the cost of long-term waste?

One approach produces systems that evolve. The other produces systems that get replaced. From an ESG perspective, the difference is significant — and it's locked in before procurement begins.

ACTION STEP: When briefing your next AV project, ask suppliers explicitly how their design approach supports lifecycle management. Upgrade pathways and modular architecture should be part of the conversation, not an afterthought.

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The Real-World Picture Is Often Very Different from the Spec

Even well-designed AV estates tend to develop inefficiencies over time. The spec says one thing. What actually happens is often another:

•       Screens remain on in unoccupied rooms for hours at a time

•       High-specification spaces are booked but not used

•       Equipment runs continuously regardless of demand

•       Rooms fall out of regular use without anyone noticing

Individually, these behaviours look minor. Across a 50 or 100-room estate, they represent meaningful energy waste — and a gap between your reported sustainability position and your actual one.

The challenge is that most organisations can't see this happening. Without visibility into how systems are actually being used, these inefficiencies are invisible until they surface as complaints or faults.

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From Specification to Performance: Closing the Reporting Gap for AV ESG Strategy

The organisations that are beginning to close this gap are doing so by introducing systematic visibility into their AV environments — not as a technical exercise, but as part of a broader ESG and operational strategy.

Platforms like SporTrack provide a live view of how AV systems are actually being used: which rooms are active, which are running unnecessarily, where energy is being consumed, and where performance is degrading. This data can be used to:

•       Inform energy reduction initiatives with real evidence

•       Support EcoVadis and other framework reporting with measurable data

•       Identify underutilised spaces and right-size the estate over time

•       Make the case for investment based on demonstrable efficiency improvements

You can read more about estate monitoring and optimisation at the SPOR Learning Centre.

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What EcoVadis Actually Rewards

EcoVadis scores organisations across four themes: environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. AV touches multiple areas — energy use, procurement policy, supplier selection, and operational transparency.

But scoring is based on evidence, not aspiration. To improve your position, you need:

•       Demonstrable environmental management processes in place

•       Measurable data that shows improvement over time

•       Consistency of approach across your estate, not just flagship sites

AV managed without visibility doesn't meet any of those criteria. AV managed with systematic monitoring and reporting can contribute meaningfully to all three.

ACTION STEP: If you're preparing for an EcoVadis assessment, ask your AV partner whether they can provide utilisation reports, energy consumption data, or lifecycle documentation. If they can't, that's worth factoring into your supplier evaluation.

IIf you're unsure what sustainable AV management looks like in practice — or how to benchmark your current estate — the SPOR AV Pricing Estimator is a useful starting point. It gives you an independent view of costs and options before you commit to anything.

Get an instant estimate  >  wearespor.com/av-pricing-estimator