"Let's go green now!" B+T wants to achieve its climate targets. The Group's own commitments to climate-neutral production are more ambitious than the legal requirements.
After intensive preliminary planning and stocktaking, the kick-off for the implementation of the sustainability strategy in the company's processes took place in mid-July 2023. The managers of the two B+T production sites, Wetzlar and Hüttenberg, came together to find out about the planned measures and the next steps. "Avoidance comes before reduction, and compensation comes last. We have it in our hands. Each individual is called upon to see what is possible in their own area," said B+T CEO Frank Benner, motivating his employees. Thanks to the networking and digitalization of production processes, which has already been successfully implemented, B+T collects a large amount of data on consumption and can assign it to orders - and therefore also to products. This means that specific key figures on the climate-damaging gases produced can already be provided.
"Avoidance comes before reduction, and compensation comes last...", statement by Frank Benner
However, there is still work to be done to record all relevant values for the creation of product passports in all areas of the greenhouse gas protocol, from Scope 1 to 3. In Sanykey diagrams, the amount ofCO2 equivalents emitted can be visualized for each plant (hardening, coating or sorting plant) and each sub-process (refrigeration plant, steam heating, process water, waste water, administration, etc.). As a supplier to the automotive industry - whose declared goal is the complete decarbonization of the entire life cycle of products and services in the supply chain - the entrepreneur is certain that one of the main criteria for awarding contracts in the coming years will be thecarbon footprint: "We think and implement - we can be better than the competition."
Concrete solutions include measures to optimize machines and technology. These are small steps that can be implemented in the short term, but also larger ones that involve investments, such as switching to renewable energy sources for in-house use, purchasing sustainable vehicles for transporting goods, etc. But any change, however small or large, cannot be achieved without a change in the awareness and understanding of the people who deal with it on a daily basis. It is planned to further sensitize all employees to the issues in training courses in the near future and to involve them in the process in working groups.
"How will we live and work in this changed world in the future?"
In addition, the management level is developing contingency plans for changing environmental and general conditions. The background questions are: "How will we live and work in this changed world in the future?" Solutions are also developed for various worst-case scenarios in which water or other resources become scarce, the infrastructure for supply and delivery is disrupted, for example due to destroyed roads, there is a shortage of workers and specialists, dependencies on third parties lead to production losses, and much more.
