Thinking beyond a company's own production sites

Since September, Schneider Schreibgeräte has been offering its popular Slider series climate neutrally, becoming the sector's first brand to do so.

Environmentalism has been taken very seriously at Schneider for many years now, with environmental responsibility anchored in company policy. Given the EMAS certification, a great deal has already been done in the past to reduce carbon emissions.
Since 1998, Schneider has been practicing professional environmental policy in line with EMAS, the strictest environment management system in the world. The certification has been renewed on a regular basis since then, with the environmental declarations demonstrating continual amelioration in environmental performance. In order to take the next step, Schneider is now working with ClimatePartner to become even more active in climate protection – especially, however, to integrate climate protection "into" the product, thereby rendering it more tangible for customers.

ClimatePartner is a leading business solutions provider for climate protection, supporting companies from all fields in attaining growth opportunities through voluntary climate protection. ClimatePartner is a pioneer in integrative climate protection software and enables its clients to carry out efficient carbon management. In conjunction with ClimatePartner, Schneider has computed the carbon footprint for the entire company.

A corporate carbon footprint discloses how much CO2 is generated by a company's activities. The carbon footprint is used as the foundation for developing concepts to reduce carbon emissions. Calculating the carbon footprint provides an additional array of advantages. Analyzing this data provides an overview of all business divisions and facilitates to enable the identification of reduction potentials in the realms of energy consumption, resource use, and carbon emissionsFor example, Schneider leveraged the footprint to recognize that 75%, i.e. the majority, of emissions are incurred from the raw materials the company purchases. Now the objective is to reduce that emissions source.

Thus, the next step will be to intensively expand environmental management to also include suppliers, with consistency throughout the entire value chain. Just like the corporate carbon footprint is used to reveal avoidable emissions in the entire company, the product carbon footprint quantifies the degree to which carbon emissions are generated by individual products. Thus the product carbon footprints computed for the Slider series provide Schneider with the opportunity to reduce these emissions. However, there will always be emissions that cannot be avoided, of course.

In collaboration with ClimatePartner, Schneider has offset the exact volume of emissions generated by the Slider series by supporting an internationally recognized and certified carbon offset project in North Rhine-Westphalia with which emissions can be reduced with a transition to energy-efficient and/or regenerative boilers and furnaces. The process makes it possible to attain climate neutrality in a product. Since regionally generated greenhouse gases disperse evenly throughout the atmosphere, it is equally beneficial to the climate whether CO2 is saved at the site where it is emitted or elsewhere.

There are many consumers who ask for and prefer sustainable products. Specialist dealers can use the Slider series to expand their product line and to reach new target groups. Since the pricing of the Slider series will not change, it will also be easy for consumers to make the decision to go with sustainable products. There are many companies directly involved in environmental protection that are looking to implement their climate protection and "green office" strategy. With the climate neutral Slider series, Schneider is offering a building block, thereby contributing to improvement in environmental performance. Moreover, our commercial customers can use the Slider series to establish a competitive advantage using the low environmental impact of these products.