Sustainability policy
I Strategy
The value of our company is always obvious when customers tell us in personal conversations or via customer surveys that our employees have once again done an outstanding job. This makes us proud every time. Our vehicles serve to protect people, and this drives us to give our best every day!
Our 150 colleagues deliver this value every day. In addition to focusing on the quality of our work and the resulting customer satisfaction, we strive to carry out our activities efficiently with the help of digital support and to make them transparent for our customers. At the same time, we are paying increasing attention to harmonizing our actions with the environment and society. These three perspectives form the pillars of our corporate strategy: customer focus, digitalization and sustainability.
As a fast-growing company, long-term orientation with a focus on these future issues is becoming increasingly important. Many short-term influencing factors or emerging market trends must be considered if we want to position our company for the future. The transformation process to become a company of the future is a very high priority for the management and all departments
As a medium-sized family business, it is in our nature to make decisions with foresight so that we can hand over a healthy company to the next generation. In the future, it will be increasingly important to reconcile different interests and requirements. Our sustainability strategy aims to align decision-making in our company precisely along this path. Based on the interplay between economic, ecological and social aspects, we are pursuing our sustainability goals in four key areas of action. In addition to significantly reducing our CO2 emissions, we want to use the resources we use sparingly. In all our business activities, we want to focus more on the health and satisfaction of our employees. Because only together can we align and develop our business model sustainably.
In a process that began with an analysis of our value creation, we first identified the topics that are relevant to us and then summarized these in the four key areas of action. We were then able to assign nine of the seventeen sustainability goals (the SDGs) of the United Nations to our strategic areas of action. These sustainability goals are intended to ensure sustainable development on an economic, social and ecological level.
II. Materiality
In its framework for sustainability reporting, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the European Union (EU) provides a methodology that we can use to identify the key sustainability issues. This considers the impact of our business activities on people and the environment as well as the financial impact of sustainability
issues on our company. If one of the two perspectives on an issue is material, we must focus our sustainability efforts on it.
At the beginning, it was crucial for us to understand how materiality must be determined in accordance with the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), the CSRD framework, so that we can continue to develop this process over the coming years.
We started this process by analyzing our value chains. As a special vehicle construction company, we take on all production steps before the vehicle can be put into service. We first summarized our production steps based on selected criteria. The criteria included, for example, which workplaces, facilities and resources are required.
As a next step, we have started to examine how our business activities impact the sustainability issues of ESRS. For example, we are focusing on acquiring steel, a key resource for us, in a sustainably produced form. The selection of steel producers is an opportunity to actively influence the reduction of CO2 emissions. This approach results in a list of so-called Impacts, Risks & Opportunities (IROs), which is then evaluated in accordance with the assessment scheme specified by the ESRS.
For this report, we have summarized key topics as IROs. Targets are defined for the IROs classified as material and measures are defined to achieve these targets. We will also collect key figures that we can use to monitor target achievement. Positive and negative impacts form the inside-out perspective in the context of the DNK. Opportunities and risks, on the other hand, are considered from the outside-in perspective.
III. Goals
In a workshop with the management and central functions of STOOF International GmbH, we jointly discussed the most important areas of action of the sustainability strategy and adopted the first concrete goals. An important milestone on the way to a more sustainable company.
Our strategic vision summarizes these goals in four key areas for us: reducing our CO2 emissions, using resources sparingly, employing healthy and satisfied employees and gradually making our business models more sustainable. These areas of action provide the framework within which we will make decisions in the future. Our employees always have top priority when it comes to achieving our goals. Their well-being ensures our success. A safe working environment and recognition of their performance is a matter of course for us. Our targets relating to accidents at work and the reduction of staff turnover focus on these aspects. Every person who works in our company should feel that they are in good hands and valued. Just as important as the well-being of our employees are the issues of CO2 emissions and the use of resources. For us, sustainability means moving away from pure consumption. Today, we must
consume most resources to run our business economically. Our vision is to produce the energy we need for our production processes ourselves or to source it from sustainable producers and to process sustainably produced steel.
We summarize the goals outlined here in various performance indicators. The Sustainability department is responsible for this. The data is recorded, standardized and evaluated. The findings are currently still made available to those responsible in the company on an annual basis. We want to shorten this cycle from 2025 to be able to act more quickly. By creating transparency, we can make targeted improvements. To this end, we have planned that employees will be able to go directly from the key figure on the health rate and further information on health in the workplace, for example, to our company’s website, which is aimed at improving health protection. This step allows us to directly link objectives, findings and improvements.
We have assigned our corporate goals to the 17 sustainability goals of the United Nations. For example, our CO2 reduction target contributes directly to the United Nations’ 13th Sustainable Development Goal, which focuses on climate protection measures. The calculation of this key figure was accompanied by several positive findings.
Equipped with this new digital navigation aid, we are well prepared for the road ahead. Now it’s time for us to consistently pursue our goals. Our goal is to achieve CO2-neutral production by 1 January 2040.
Because as the old saying goes: “The deed is what separates the goal from the dream.”
