Environmental management
Group environmental protection policies and measures are managed by the Group Environmental Sustainability Committee. This body was established in 2008 in order to improve our performance in the areas of environmental protection and occupational safety (two very important issues in our sector) and to promote the exchange of information between regions and business lines. Under the lead management of the Global Environmental Sustainability department, the committee’s experts from the different business lines and Group areas define guidelines, goals and measures, and coordinate their implementation.
We are planning to introduce certified environmental management systems at all of our cement plants worldwide by 2020 in order to further solidify our environmental protection activities at all of our locations. Our efforts here will be based on the ISO 14001 international environmental management standard. We will, however, also permit the use of nationally recognised environmental management systems. At the moment, 74% of our cement plants operate with a certified environmental management system.
In addition, we have set ourselves the goal that 25% of the facilities operated by all of our business lines will have undergone an independent environmental audit in the five years by 2012. Additional plans call for all locations to have undergone such an audit by 2020. These audits are not only important to us in terms of monitoring our environmental performance; they will also help us identify and address areas in need of improvement. We also frequently employ locally developed environmental protection solutions as examples of best practice that can be used by other facilities.
Nature conservation and biodiversity management play a key role in our environmental protection activities. We established an internal guideline for Europe in 2009 in order to promote biodiversity in our quarries in a targeted manner and to minimise the impact our business activities have on the natural environment. This guideline defines for the first time our Group-wide standards for recultivation and renaturation measures.
Our goal here is to create a biodiversity management plan for all the quarries within the Natura 2000 network of the European Union. This plan will enable us to safeguard long-term raw material supply and production in accordance with stringent environmental legislation. In Asia-Oceania we have introduced the guideline in a modified form as a handbook of recommendations that takes special regional conditions into account. The same procedure will be applied for North America.