Sustainable action across all processes, departments and areas of responsibility is an integral part of our business activities. Crucial to this is our aspiration to continuously do better. This requires us to consistently pursue and regularly review our defined goals and targets. In addition to evaluating the progress made, this is also based on being receptive to external impulses and developments. Over the past few years, we have seen that pursuing our strategy with conviction bears fruit. This incentivizes us for the future as much as the increased expectations placed in us by our own employees, our customers or the more stringent regulatory requirements.
Reducing and managing our own emissions as well as those along the supply chain remains of crucial importance for our sustainability agenda. Our climate protection target, validated by the independent Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), sets the direction. In order to make an even greater contribution to achieving national and global thresholds in the fight against climate change, we decided to tighten our target once again in 2023 by aligning it with the 1.5°C benchmark in accordance with the Paris Climate Agreement. In addition, our sustainability management focuses on other important issues, such as respecting human rights along the entire supply chain and ensuring comprehensive occupational safety for our employees.
The economic and geopolitical environment remains challenging. While the global economy performed better than expected and the high inflation seen at the beginning of the year gradually subsided, the business climate continued to be characterized by a high degree of uncertainty due, among other things, to wars and crises as well as decreasing transport volumes. Other contributing factors are increasing customer demands with regard to speed, flexibility and the quality of supply, and increasing environmental awareness among the population. The shortage of skilled labor remains a pressing concern. Our sustainability activities reflect major changes in the framework conditions, which can also lead to delays in implementation. However, in all cases, our action is guided by our long-term ambition to strike a balance between economic performance, social commitment and responsibility for the environment. By giving consideration to all three of these aspects in equal measure, we gain a holistic understanding of the opportunities, challenges and interdependencies, and on this basis can act responsibly in all matters relating to sustainability.
Our commitment builds on the three pillars ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL and ECONOMIC. We explain in the chapter Our Sustainability Approach which specific fields of action we have assigned to each of these pillars and where and to what extent we are influencing sustainable change. In doing so, we are also guided by external objectives and frameworks. For example, in 2022 we already signed the UN Global Compact, committing ourselves to integrating its ten principles into our corporate strategy, culture and day-to-day operations. Joining the UN Global Compact Network Germany (UN GCD) in December 2023 was the next logical step. More detailed information about our material topics is provided in the Materiality Analysis section.
Responsibilities and management accounting
Responsibility for monitoring, improving and implementing our sustainability management lies with our central Sustainability department, which also prepares this report and is assigned to the Finance department. Accordingly, the head of the central department reports directly to our CFO. The department is also where the sustainability-related activities from the AUTOMOBILE and CONTRACT Divisions are clustered, and it is also responsible for calculating our energy and carbon footprint as well as supporting cross-divisional energy management. In 2023, our head of Sustainability was also appointed human rights officer and in this role is responsible for the risk management system under the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz – LkSG), among other things.
The team acts as an interface and generates important initiatives and ideas, driving sustainability throughout the company. Of particular importance in this connection is the definition and implementation of sustainability targets and the selection of appropriate standards. Thus, a number of objectives were newly developed or adapted in the year under review – an overview is provided in the table here. The Sustainability Board (SSB), which was set up in 2021 and includes representatives from the central Sustainability, Legal, Insurance & GRC, Purchasing, Financial Services/Investor Relations, Human Resources, Safety & Environmental Protection and Integrated Management Systems departments, is also involved in steering our goals. The Board’s mission, tasks and roles are being more sharply defined in order to enable it to respond even better to new and upcoming legal requirements. In future, the Board will not only evaluate the sustainability objectives and targets, but also the tasks arising under the provisions of the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act.
Aspects of social sustainability, and specifically the interests of our employees, are the responsibility of the central Human Resources department, represented on the Board of Management in the reporting year by our Labor Relations Director. We can only act sustainably across the board if we develop together – and to achieve this, we rely on feedback and dialog. Under the umbrella of our culture change initiative #SuccessDependsOnEverybody, staff are given regular opportunities for feedback to the Board of Management and other executive staff. The culture and message behind #SuccessDependsOnEverybody were communicated at seven roadshows in the reporting year, bringing the number of events held at our sites across Germany since the start of the roadshows to over 130. Taken together, over 800 questions from employees were answered at the roadshows in 2022 and 2023. 2023 was also the year for the entire workforce – not just senior executives – to reflect on their own actions and their impact. Sustainably managing experiences and mistakes is, after all, firmly anchored in our corporate culture. For more information about the people at BLG and our role as an employer, please refer to the SOCIAL section.
Values, guidelines and management systems
Our corporate values committed, respectful, passionate, responsible and open to change form the basis of our shared culture – and at the same time the guideposts for our sustainability management. Our set of guidelines maps the legal and ethical standards to which we have committed. This not only provides guidance for our employees in their day-to-day work, but also clearly communicates our expectations to partners and suppliers. Our overarching compliance system ensures adherence to laws and principles – more information in the respective section Compliance.
Our sustainability strategy is additionally flanked by tried-and-tested and in many cases certified management systems. These relate to quality management, environmental management, energy management, and occupational health and safety management. We have also established a compliance and information security management system. More details are provided in the relevant sections. We detail the key elements of our corporate governance structures in our Corporate Governance Report, which simultaneously constitutes the corporate governance statement pursuant to Section 289a of the German Commercial Code (HGB). This focuses on the corresponding statement by the Board of Management and the Supervisory Board and significant corporate governance practices that go beyond the statutory requirements. It also explains the procedures of the Board of Management and Supervisory Board including their composition. For more information, see the Governance section.
Rankings and recognitions
BLG Handelslogistik GmbH & Co. KG is a member of the Advisory Board of the Lean & Green non-profit initiative. Having received the Lean & Green award in 2015, we now rank among the Lean & Green 1st Star winners in recognition of our significant reduction in CO2 emissions. We again received honors in the reporting year, with our new and sustainable C3 Bremen logistics center scooping up two awards: the Supplier Award from our customer Mercedes-Benz Group AG and the special “Energy Efficiency” award of the German mobility industry.
In order to obtain an independent appraisal, we regularly engage external agencies to evaluate our sustainability performance and again in 2023 achieved another silver CSR rating from EcoVadis, placing us among the top 23 percent of the companies assessed in our industry. For the third time, we disclosed our emission data to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) in the reporting year. We were able to improve our ranking by one level to a “B” compared to the previous year and are now above the industry average.