Environmental Management – Being Consistent in Our Own House We implement environmental protection consistently also in our own house. The Federal Environment Agency (UBA) has practiced an environmental management system since the mid-1990s. This system has met the strict requirements of the European EMAS regulation since 2001 – at that time UBA was the first federal institute to comply and its activity is now running at six sites. The Eco-Management and Audit Scheme or EMAS stands for systematic operational environmental protection at a high level and helps to reduce the consumption of natural resources thereby saving costs. In our environmental guidelines we commit ourselves to an environmentally friendly behaviour which means that we procure the most environmentally friendly products, use resources economically and reduce, reuse, recycle and dispose of wastes in an environmentally friendly way. We organise our business travel as environmentally carefully as possible and involve our contractors in our environmental management scheme. In order to make all this possible and identify other improvement opportunities, we carry out regular environmental audits and publish the results and the following actions. This contributes significantly to UBA’s credibility and strengthens our position in the environmental debate, where one of our goals is to present EMAS as an important tool of environmental policy. Energy conservation and resource management within UBA enjoy high priority. Whether it is the construction and maintenance of buildings, repair of machinery and equipment or
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the care of outdoor facilities: The structural and technical infrastructure must be as energy efficient as possible. We want to reduce our energy consumption, which is low anyway, by another five percent by 2012. Our production and use of renewable energy will increase and we intend to double our own electricity production from renewable sources by 2012. We will achieve this environmental goal by combining the already planned construction measures with the installation of additional photovoltaic systems and other renewable energy technologies.
EMAS – varified environmental management
We keep our employees informed regularly and extensively about opportunities for environmental protection in the workplace and support them specifically in making their everyday work environmentally friendly. We also encourage our employees to become actively involved in the operational issues of envi-
What matters 2011
ronmental management which focuses their consciousness on practical environmental protection. We preferably procure products whose manufacture, use and disposal excel with regard to environmental compatibility. With our tenders for green electricity, PC workstations, network printers and office and conference furniture, we not only promote environmental protection within UBA, but also set the standards for other institutions. Our green procurement scheme was awarded the European EMAS Award by the European Commission in 2009. In order to reduce the environmental impact of our extensive business travel, we established guidelines for environmentally friendly business travel management. We have committed ourselves to reducing business trips by organising videoconferences or bundling the business issues in meetings, preferring environmentally sound means of transport, possibly selecting accommodation with an environmental management system (for example EMAS) and to offset the climatic effects of our travel by ambitious climate protection projects. We will reduce our business travel by increasing the number of videoconferences by another twelve percent by 2012 in comparison to 2009. We want to increase the percentage of our employees who walk, cycle or use public transport to and from work, from a current 67 to 70 percent by 2012. By comparison, the share of these environmentally sound means of transport to and from work in Germany is around 30 percent. Energy consumed by UBA’s information and communications