ESG lies at the core of what we do at Fagron.
You might wonder, what is ESG? ESG is short for Environmental, Social, and Governance. We like to use the term ESG because it clearly shows that we care about the environment, people, and doing business responsibly!
The start of our ESG journey
We started our ESG journey in 2020 by talking to our customers, employees, and shareholders to understand what they care about. We also looked at (upcoming) changes in legislation, requirements of banks to supply loans, and the areas that ESG rating organizations and financial market analysts find important.
Together, this led to a long list of ESG topics in five categories:
- Low impact on the Environment
- Benefits to Our People
- Responsibility in the Supply Chain
- Giving Back
- Good Governance
Because we care and want to make an impact, we have decided to focus on the 16 topics that we think are most important to the success of our business until 2025.
For each of the 16 topics, we answer three questions:
- Why do we find this topic important?
- What goal do we want to achieve, and when?
- How do we reach the goal?
We will give you one example. For climate change, we align with the Paris agreement and want to reduce our emissions to keep global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius. By the end of 2025, we want to reduce our greenhouse gas intensity by 30% compared to 2019. To reach this goal, we install solar panels, replace old equipment with energy-efficient equipment, and switch lease cars using fossil fuel to electric lease cars.
We published our first ESG Strategy at the beginning of 2021. In this strategy, we answered the three questions for all ESG topics that we selected. If you are interested to read our strategy, you can find it here.
What we do to reach our goals and how we measure progress
For every topic, there is a lot of work to be done! Many people need to put in the time to reach our goals. For example, for the topics in the category “Benefits to Our People” our ESG department works with the HR department and all the local Fagron companies.
A few (we think) nice examples of things that we worked on in 2021:
- Install solar panels on five different locations, a total of 2788 solar panels!
- Research ways to increase the recycling of the waste in our facilities.
- Promote that our employees discuss their career development during a yearly performance and development discussion with their manager. (85% did in 2021!)
- Develop a Business Partner Code of Conduct that shows our suppliers how we expect them to do business.
- Organize an anti-corruption and bribery training for all employees and managers.
We want to have a good overview of the progress that we are making on each of our ESG topics. We have developed and are continuously improving a Fagron Dashboard. Where everyone working for Fagron can see the progress that we are making.
Lastly, we try to be as transparent as possible in reporting our activities and results to everyone not working for Fagron. Our 2020 annual report contains details of the work we have done in 2020. Our 2021 annual report will be even more jam-packed with information!
Solar panels installed on one of the two Fagron Services locations in Brazil (Anápolis).Follow our ESG journey
Because the world changes fast, we take a good look at the list of ESG topics every two years to see if any topic has become more important to us, our customers, employees, and shareholders. Every year we also evaluate if we want to update our goals or add new goals. Because we are ambitious, we have added some more goals at the beginning of 2022. You can find our press release with information about the update here.
Are you curious about our next steps and 2022 results? Follow us on our ESG Journey!
Do you have any questions or suggestions? You can reach us at ESG@fagron.com.
