24 May 2023

When climate action becomes profitable - then it's Enkelfähig

“Let’s make this reality, not just another slide deck.” With this promise to each other Maren Otte and Luca Costa started working on CWS’s climate action plan. Their goal: Produce a roadmap that would enable CWS to reduce its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030. In the end, Maren, Luca and an entire team of experts delivered much more than that: They managed to build a positive business case for their decarbonization roadmap. And while the first carbon-reducing initiatives are already being implemented with CWS divisions planning and piloting projects across several sites, Maren and Luca have now won the first ever Enkelfähig Award. Congratulations!

Outstanding: Haniel CPSO Katharina Peterwerth presented Maren Otte with the Enkelfähig Award. With its climate protection roadmap, CWS shows that CO2 reduction can be a real business advantage.

Climate action as a positive business case

A real premiere happened at this year’s Haniel Leadership Meeting: Maren Otte, Director Corporate Communications & Sustainability at CWS, together with Luca Costa, who works as a Sustainability Manager in her team, won the first ever Enkelfähig Award for a project that triggered a paradigm shift across the Haniel Group: A climate action plan that delivers a positive business case on all investments within one decade. What could be more enkelfähig than that?

Reality, not PowerPoint

Creating this plan took 14 weeks of focused work and roughly 40 experts from many different functions and business areas. “In the beginning, Luca and I made a promise to each other”, Maren says. “This is not going to be PowerPoint. This is going to be reality.” Luca had only recently started working for CWS when the project kicked off. He adds: “Not that we don’t have slides, in fact we had a bunch of those, but it’s so much more than that.”

 

Dr. Maren Otte, Director Corporate Communications & Sustainability at CWS
Luca Costa, Sustainability Manager at CWS

The goal: Reduce emissions by 50 percent by 2030

“I had never worked on a similar project for such a big and complex organization like CWS”, says Luca. The four CWS divisions Hygiene, Workwear, Fire Safety and Cleanrooms employ more than 10,000 people and operate from 58 sites in 15 countries. Several industrial-scale laundries, a fleet of delivery vans and a large network of suppliers and partners come with the territory. Luca and Maren’s task: To come up with a plan that would reduce CWS’s emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Not a job that could be done by just two sustainability managers! So, the two of them enlisted some expert help.

 

Aha moment: Reduction measures with a positive financial impact

“It was impressive to see how we were quickly able to generate awareness on this crucial topic within the organization, successfully involving people from different functions and from all the divisions. People were really on board and waiting for someone tell them where to start”, Luca remembers. CWS experts from logistics, supply chain, laundry and product management got involved and contributed valuable ideas on how to reduce emissions in their specific area of operations. Workshops helped to prioritize those: Which ones would have the largest impact? How difficult would implementation be? Those were the questions the team needed to find answers to.

Maren continues: “From all those great ideas, we filtered it down to 19 and started to crunch some big numbers – implementation costs, total emissions saved, et cetera. That’s when we experienced a real aha-moment.” What the numbers showed: Some measures would have a positive financial impact only a few years after implementation. The all-important KPI: net present value (NPV). Put simply, it determines whether a project will result in a net profit or loss.

19 measures for the climate action roadmap

By calculating the NPV alongside the emissions-reduction potential of all 19 measures, the project team, supported by experts from Accenture, was able to put together a climate action roadmap that would deliver a positive business case for CWS by the end of the decade. Crucially, this plan works with technology that is available today – further improvements and earlier profits are possible when technology becomes more cost-effective and efficient. “For example, transitioning our fleet to electric vans would save 50,000 tons of CO2 equivalents until 2030, but as of today this measure has a negative NPV. We are confident, though, that this will change. At the same time, we are starting right away with measures that comes with a clearly positive business case – such as photovoltaic installations”, Luca explains.

As Luca and Maren were able to present their plan in time for budget planning last year, implementation is already ongoing. “We provided each division with an individual plan and guidelines. If they follow the plan, they will reach the target of -50% emissions by 2030. But, of course, there is flexibility, and they can adapt the plan according to their needs”, Luca says.

Maren adds: “The real beauty of this project, however, is that we now have a systematic way of comparing alternatives and prioritizing climate action measures. We can see that across the Haniel Group this project helped to change how people think about CO2 reduction – away from something that is expensive towards a real business advantage. In other words: Enkelfähig.”

Author

Julia Heitmann

Northener who found a new home on the Rhine. Heads the communications team at Haniel and loves to write about all the heroes who work behind the scenes. Favorite places on the Enkelfähig Campus: the museum and the gym.
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