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Building our Sustainability Strategy with CSRD
Customer audits, employee vitality initiatives, ISO-certifications, energy reduction programs, local sponsorships, Ecovadis submissions … If you think about it, actually we’re already doing a lot on the wide topic of ‘sustainability’ from a day to day base within the Rompa Group. We just don’t always realize it, maybe. But, we don’t have a long-term group strategy yet, when it comes to sustainability. So, where are we with this?
Rompa Group sustainability planning for 2024
With the growing awareness for the environment, people and governance with our world of business, it was time for Rompa to take a stand. Stakeholders like customers and financiers are raising the bar when it comes to ‘ESG’-requirements (E = Environment, S = Social, G = Governance), and international regulations are heading our way now very rapidly. Like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (‘CSRD’) from the European Union. Therefore within our corporate strategic plan towards 2030, one of the key objectives was to set-up an internal Sustainability team this year, and lay the fundament for our long-term Sustainability strategy.
This lead to the following plan for 2024:
Asking our stakeholders
After having installed Tim Franssen as our group Sustainability Manager, every plant appointed a Sustainability Representative, and with this our Sustainability Team was born. Good to know is, that Rompa is CSRD-compliant as from 2025. And this regulation requires a company to have a clear strategy and KPI’s around the most important material topics for a company. To determine the most important sustainability topics, the first steps to take is to do a proper stakeholder analysis, in which we asked our most important stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, financiers, shareholders – what is important for them in relation to Rompa, when it comes to ESG.
Some interesting takes from the dialogue we had with our customers:
• “Big contributor on our scope 3 is the ‘hardware’ we buy; so we need the support from our suppliers, starting with a product carbon footprint”
• “A score of < 45 points on Ecovadis will become a hard requirement for us as from 2025”
• “Sustainability will be a fixed factor in our tender process, focussing on: material usage, efficiency and product carbon footprint”
Where is Rompa’s impact?
After these conversations, a list of most important topics was put together and presented to our Global Management Team. During a workshop, it was discussed where as Rompa we believe we make impact, which topics can have an impact (mostly financial) on us, and on which themes we believe as a company we should focus on towards the future. This lead to the following materiality analysis, in which six topics appeared to be ‘material’ and with this are the pillars of our Sustainability policy.
Taking our responsibility
As the list shows, this means that Rompa wants to take its responsibility on several Environmental and Social topics. Like increasing our efforts on reducing climate change, and stimulating the use of sustainable materials like recycled and bio-based plastics. On the social side, we’re focusing on good working conditions, guaranteeing a healthy and safe work environment, and equal treatment and opportunities. What this means in regards of actions and targets, will become more and more clear in the coming months.
Next steps
Looking at our sustainability plan shown in image 1, the first four steps have been finalized. This is the so called ‘design phase’ of our Sustainability / CSRD strategy. The next step will be to do a measurement throughout all our plants on the material topics. Meaning: what is our carbon footprint per plant? How do we perform on safety? What do we do to eliminate harassment? Here the plants and the Sustainability Representatives come into play: they are to collect this data, so together we can define where we are, and where we want to head towards, in the coming years. An exciting journey, and we promise to keep you informed along the way!