Sustainability
is the nature
of our business
It is with pleasure and pride that I present the first Sustainability Report of Faber Group. Sustainability is anchored in the nature of our core business (circular load carrier pooling) and in our hearts.
In the past few years, we have put a lot of effort in creating insight in our impact. This has not just provided clarity, but also a clear focus for our sustainability strategy. It’s important to realise that Faber Group has impact on its own activities, but that most of our impact comes from improving the sustainability of our customers’ supply chains by providing them circular load carrier solutions. We quantify the carbon emissions that our customers save by making use of our sustainable pooling model – which we refer to as Scope 4 or ‘avoided emissions’. My strong belief is that this should become part of international sustainability standards.
Part of our exercise to create this report has been a materiality assessment, a Life Cycle Analysis of our pooling business and baseline measurement of our current footprint. This has given us insight in our status and the direction to set ambitious, yet realistic sustainability goals. To be completely transparent, we noticed that some KPIs in 2022 have been less favourable compared to 2021 – here the major gain is that we now have that insight and that we can focus on action for the coming years to really improve this.
By now the focus of our leadership team has shifted from operational and financial targets only, to including sustainability targets. Therefore projects are being approached in an integrated way – value creation instead of just business growth.
In this balancing act we have to make realistic decisions regarding sustainability and profitability. Sometimes this might mean we won’t go for the most sustainable solution in the short term. Not because we don’t want to, but because we need to safeguard our cost-competitiveness to exist in the long term. This way we can keep providing circular, sustainable load carrier solutions to our customers – where we have most impact. For now and the future.
For us it is the first step into integrated steering, reporting and compliance to the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) legislation. This way, we are carrying impact.
Ingrid Faber CEO Faber Group