Feeling responsible for water and the entire nature is no strategy of Sonett but the company’s profound conviction which was also the incentive for the enterprise to be founded. This is the reason for our main concern centring on avoiding and reducing global warming gases which are detrimental to the climate. Being well aware of this responsibility, Sonett started taking measures as early as 2011 to reduce our own CO2e emission. Unfortunately, a manufacturer of goods is never in a position to completely prevent CO2 emissions. We do, however, compensate the emission which continues despite our reduction measures, by the purchase of CO2 certificates. To this purpose we do the carbon footprinting of our enterprise on the basis of the internationally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol Standards. Since 2021 we have been supported in this endeavour by ClimatePartner.
Taken into account our activities at Deggenhausen, the company’s headquarters, a Corporate Carbon Footprint is drawn up.
Our CCF covers the emissions caused by direct activities of the company (scope 1) and indirect emission resulting from purchased energy or heat (scope 2) whose inclusion is mandatory according to the GHG Protocol.
The upstream and downstream processes (scope 3) may, as an option, be included in the Corporate Carbon Footprinting, according to the GHG Protocol. Common practice is to take into account the following scope3 processes in the CCF: The employees’ commuting, business trips, stationery, as well as advertising and information brochures. This is exactly how we have proceeded. In addition, we take into account on a voluntary basis, and have done so from the very beginning, our product packaging (primary and secondary packaging). This is the area which represents by large the biggest part of our CCF.
New Sonett Building
Not included in the footprinting is the largest part of the so-called upstream and downstream processes, e. g. our raw materials, all transport to our premises and the transport to trade and consumers, as well as the disposal of our packaging. Our carbon footprint is, therefore, no PCF (Product Carbon Footprint) but a Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF). The PCF covers the entire value chain of a product. It requires that full responsibility be assumed for the respective climate-related impact across all stages of the value chain. This is done by having each stage footprinted and by reducing its CO2e emission as much as possible. After that, the remaining emissions are being neutralized by supporting climate protection projects.
Our company’s carbon footprinting is carried out on the basis of the internationally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG) Standards. (https://ghgprotocol.org/corporate-standard). It is not only CO2 which is taken into account, but all relevant climate gases defined in the Kyoto Protocol, converted in CO2 equivalents. (https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/klima-energie/klimaschutz-energiepolitik-in-deutschland/treibhausgas-emissionen/die-treibhausgase). CO2 equivalents (CO2e) are a unit of measurement for standardizing the impact that the different greenhouse gases, such as methane-CH4, nitrous oxide N2O, PFCs have on climate.
The footprinting of the CO2e emissions is realized on the basis of the GHG Protocol, the certifying is based on footprinting, reduction and compensation. From 2011 to 2020 we were being footprinted and certified by Stop Climate Change. Since 2021 ClimatePartner has been our new certifier.
In November 2021 we entered into a climate partnership with the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, having agreed to keep up our present endeavours to protect the climate, for the time being for 10 years, and to continue working on further reducing emissions.
Concerning the topic climate protection it is our main concern to prevent emissions and to compensate the remaining emissions. For this reason, we are consistently working on optimizing our processes and products as far as sustainability and climate protection are concerned. Since 2011 we have implemented an annually up-dated concept for establishing reduction measures whose effect is evaluated in retrospect.
Examples of concrete CO2e reductions:
The following table shows that compared to our sales development, the CO2e emissions tend to be lower in the years 2016 – 2020. The remaining CO2e emissions having increased in 2018 compared to those of 2017 is owned to the fact that we built our new warehouse and a new office floor in 2016 and 2017. The substantial decrease in 2020 is due to the enormous increase in turnover, with the number of buildings and machinery having remained the same.
Furthermore, one has to take into account that the CO2e reductions realized naturally continue diminishing the more measures were implemented in the past.
The compensation of the emission takes place by purchasing CO2e emission certificates. The emission certificates come from climate protection projects that are certified by the Gold Standard in whose development the WWF cooperated actively. When selecting climate protection projects, we also pay attention to the improvement of the social conditions of people involved in the project. Here listed are the projects we support:
For the time being we are supporting the following two projects:
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