Since 1993, the Environment Ministry of Baden-Württemberg has been honouring companies and the self-employed from industry, trade, handicrafts, and services who have performed ecologically exceptional and highly skilled work for the promotion of environmental protection within operations and environmentally focused company management. This year, elobau has been recognised for its work in this field with the award in the category of ‘Industrial company with more than 250 employees’. The awards ceremony took place on December 9, 2020, as part of a festive event by Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann and Environment Minister Franz Untersteller in the White Hall of the New Palace in Stuttgart. The award comes with prize money of €10,000, to be spent on further environmental protection measures.
Award Ceremony Environmental Prize for Business Baden-Württemberg 2020
In particular, the environmental award honours the central role that environmental protection plays in all the elobau business’s departments, from energy efficiency and sustainable electricity generation using renewable technologies to climate-neutral production since 2010, right through to a reduction of transport routes. This is because elobau produces exclusively in Germany, builds many of its required components itself, and sources 96 per cent of the purchased parts from the EU, with suppliers also being checked in terms of their environmental compliance. When producing the carbon footprint according to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG), both direct emissions and also indirect emissions from upstream and downstream processes (scope 3), such as daily employee commutes to work, are taken into account.
“We are a concerned company and take responsibility for our ecological and social impact. This award from the state of Baden-Württemberg will give us even greater motivation in pursuing this objective”, states Michael Hetzer, Executive Director at elobau. “We are convinced that a healthy environment and a well-balanced society are the basis for long-term economic success.” The evolution of elobau from a family business to a foundation company in 2016 was also predicated on these core assumptions. The elobau foundation funds education and community projects with a fixed proportion of the profits from elobau GmbH & Co. KG. Since assuming an ECG (economy for the common good) business model, elobau is the first company in the electronics and machine building sector to produce an externally audited ‘common good balance sheet’.