Schaebens supports climate protection
As of the 1st of August 2018, all of Schaebens’ products are carbon neutral. This makes Schaebens the first major consumer goods manufacturer in Germany to have converted its entire product range to be carbon neutral.
Corporate Responsibility at Schaebens
Climate change is one of the greatest global issues of our time. One of our many duties and objectives as a traditional family-run company is to shoulder responsibility for our fellow humans and the natural environment. As such, we want to further strengthen our commitment to environmental responsibility in addition to corporate social responsibility. At Schaebens, we want to do even more as a company to promote environmentally friendly practices. In order to do so, it’s of vital importance that we are aware of the impact and consequences of our activities on natural ecosystems. Only when we know what the relevant baseline values are, can we as a company act in an even more environmentally oriented manner going forward. As we at Schaebens have already demonstrated, it is not only possible to operate economically, but in an environmentally responsible manner too; by implementing numerous successful measures for avoiding and reducing emissions, e.g. with respect to packaging materials and by optimising the logistics processes, we believe we’re on the right track.
Carbon-neutral Schaebens’ products – in practice, this means:
The approach we’re taking focuses in particular on reducing and offsetting greenhouse gases. In this case, it’s irrelevant where the greenhouse gases are actually produced and where they can be offset. Our first priority is to avoid and reduce all emissions generated by our group to the greatest extent possible. After that, all unavoidable greenhouse gases are offset by supporting recognised climate protection projects – so-called CO2 compensation.
For this purpose, we collaborated with Climate Partner to determine all of the CO2 emissions produced by our company. Together, we scrutinised the individual stages of our performance chain in detail in order to ascertain our group’s Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF). Key areas included our production facility, mobility, logistics, raw materials, packaging and product manufacturing processes. The evaluated data was then used to calculate a carbon footprint for our company, which we then used as the basis to implement a sustainable climate protection concept for all of our business operations.
Support for climate protection projects
According to the principle of carbon offsetting, it’s possible for us, via Climate Partner, to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions we generate by supporting a recognised climate protection project. This project makes an important contribution to climate protection and not only helps in achieving the global climate targets, but contributes to achieving the UN sustainability goals too.
At Schaebens, we have decided to support, via our partner Climate Partner, a climate protection project in the threatened ecosystem of the Amazon in Portel (Brazil). The project in question is certified in accordance with the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard Gold Level (CCBS). Amongst other things, this project seeks to protect the local forest resources that span an area of 177,900 hectares from illegal felling.
Although supporting this project allows us to offset our carbon footprint, social responsibility is even more important to us. So we’re proud to say that this project not only contributes to protecting the rain forest, but creates alternative sources of income for the indigenous population, reduces inequality by securing land rights and conserves one of the most biodiverse and at the same time most threatened ecosystems in the world.
Future developments
The goal of making our products climate neutral in this way is not simply a one-off project for our company, which – once achieved – is deemed concluded. We see climate protection as a long-term, ongoing process. As such, we want to keep our carbon emissions to the bare minimum in the future too. With this in mind, we will be calculating our CCF on an annual basis in order to reduce our emissions as much as possible. We will continue to completely offset unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions by supporting the climate protection project in future.
By regularly assessing and maintaining the carbon neutrality of our products, we’re fulfilling our corporate responsibility obligations and supporting climate protection in the long-term in the process.
