Today we celebrate Earth Day at Fagron! This is an annual event held on the 22nd of April to show support for environmental protection. It is of great importance to us as it is in line with our ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) strategy. We strive to reduce our impact on the environment as much as we can.
At Fagron, we focus on the following three environmental topics:
Curious about what we do to reduce our carbon footprint and energy use? Keep reading! More information on the other environmental topics can be found here.
Targets to reduce our carbon footprint and energy use
Our journey started in 2018 by looking into our carbon footprint for the first time. In 2019 we formulated goals to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of our activities by 30% by the end of 2025 in comparison to 2019. This means we will reduce emissions from refrigerants (scope 1), energy use (scope 1 and 2), and business travel (both by car and airplane) (scope 1, 2, and 3).
At the beginning of this year, we have added a goal to only use renewable electricity by the end of 2030. We will reach this target by generating electricity with solar panels on our facilities and by buying energy from a sustainable source.
What is next? We would like to set science-based targets (SBTi) at the end of this year, which means that we will ensure that our emissions are in line with the Paris agreement. We also want to start measuring our Scope 3 emissions, this includes for example the electricity use of the Fagron Lab products that we sell and the emissions from employees traveling back and forth to work.
What have we already done?
You might wonder what we have done so far? There are four different programs that we are working on: (1) installing LED lighting, (2) installing solar panels, (3) changing lease cars to electric cars, and (4) implementing energy management systems.
All the Fagron locations are changing their regular lighting to LED lighting. Of course, that is not all we do. In both 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, projects were either carried out or started in 14 facilities to replace old lighting with LED lighting. After completion of these projects, at least 50 of our 70 locations will be equipped with LED lighting. The other locations will follow soon.
In 2021, solar panels have been installed at five facilities that provide approximately 20% of the electricity consumption of the facilities per location. We will be working on at least 8 more solar panel projects in 2022. With the locations that already had solar panels in 2020, that means we will have solar panels in 15 of our 70 locations.
We are exchanging fossil fuel lease cars for vehicles driving fully electric, or plug-in hybrid cars. At the end of 2021 18% of our fleet consisted of full-electric or PHEVs. This year we will also introduce energy management in several of our large locations to get an even better grip on energy consumption!
Results
Due to our efforts, we have reduced our carbon footprint intensity in comparison to 2019. Our total greenhouse gas emissions have stayed almost the same between 2019 and 2021 even though there are now more companies in the Fagron Group than there were in 2019!
Greenhous gas intensity per year
Greenhouse gas emissions per year
All emissions are location-based emissions in ton CO2-eq per year. For market-based emissions for 2019 and 2021 see the Carbon Footprint 2021 report here.
Follow our ESG journey
We try to ensure our goals are being met and want to be transparent about our results and activities. We plan to give even more updates and of course, you can find even more details in our annual report for 2021.
We are always interested in hearing about ESG initiatives at our companies and organizations. If you have any questions or suggestions on what we could do to improve, you can reach us at ESG@fagron.com.
