The Sustainability Report of BLG LOGISTICS has become a key component of our overall business reporting. It was prepared in accordance with the GRI standards. We make the associated GRI Content Index available online.
To get ready for mandatory sustainability reporting under the EU Corporate Sustainability Directive, we have taken first steps to prioritize the requirements that are expected to apply in the future. One aspect of this is deciding which fields of action to set targets for. As in previous years, the CSR Index shows where the topics relevant to non-financial reporting (NFR) appear in the various sections of the present report.
Boundaries and reporting scope
Our sustainability reporting covers the fully consolidated companies of the BLG LOGISTICS GROUP that belong exclusively to the AUTOMOBILE and CONTRACT Divisions. When identifying and selecting the material topics and prioritizing the contents for the combined non-financial statement, we focused on these two divisions as well as our central departments.
This report concentrates on the domestic BLG companies. They account for 91.7 percent of all employees and 95.7 percent of revenue of the fully consolidated locations, i.e., the most substantial part of our business activities. To present our sustainability performance as comprehensively as possible, we are constantly striving to collect and make available as much data as possible, including for our foreign companies. For a number of years now, we have included the consumption of the relevant international locations in our energy and greenhouse gas accounting, and from the last report we also began presenting differentiated human resources KPIs for the individual countries.
The third business division, CONTAINER, is represented by the EUROGATE Group, in which BLG LOGISTICS has a 50 percent shareholding. EUROGATE is the leading shipping line-independent container terminal group in Europe. EUROGATE manages the areas that are relevant for non-financial reporting – including energy, the environment, personnel and compliance – independently. We therefore present the NFR-relevant topics for the CONTAINER Division separately in the EUROGATE section.
Identifying and selecting the reported aspects
The topics we focus on in this report continue to take their cues from an extensive process to determine the content of our sustainability reporting developed in 2018 (see the Sustainability Report for that year), annual topic reviews, as well as an in-depth internal materiality review conducted within the Sustainability Board in 2021. This re-evaluated the importance of the individual aspects for our economic success as well as the impact of our business activities on the environment and society, thus ensuring that the content of our reporting remains relevant and current developments and new insights are given consideration. Apart from this, we continued in 2023 to collect and report on the key performance indicators in line with the GRI requirements.
Weighting of our material topics
We have assigned our material topics to the three pillars ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL and ECONOMIC and arranged them in the materiality matrix below according to their relevance for BLG LOGISTICS and their impacts on the environment and on society. This presents a classification of the aspects according to whether they are important, very important or of highest priority for us, with only the latter being included in our non-financial report. In addition, we have linked the topics to the respective SDGs that we want to contribute to achieving.
The materiality review described above gave rise to two changes compared to the previous year. With the coming into force of the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG), which as of 2023 is also mandatory for BLG LOGISTICS, it is once again reaffirmed by law that material topics for us, such as Fair Working Conditions, Occupational Health & Safety Management and Human Rights, are relevant along the entire supply chain. We have therefore decided to no longer list Sustainable Supply Chain separately in the matrix, but to treat it in future as an integrated aspect that encompasses or touches on numerous topics. We report on our progress in implementing the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act and other explicitly supply chain-related aspects separately in the Sustainable Supply Chain section. In addition, we have defined a target for the aspect Resource Conservation and Waste Management (see overview of our ESG targets). In this context, it was logical to assign this topic to the very important rather than the important aspects. There were no shifts with regard to any of the other topics.
Materiality matrix 2023
In the following, we describe our management approach for each material topic, and also present selected key performance indicators in accordance with the GRI guidelines. In addition, we explain how we address the aspects of the NFR – and present the underlying concepts, results, evaluation methods and other relevant KPIs. You can find an overarching risk assessment in the section Risk Management.