Sustainability is one of our main ambitions. In addition to social and economic sustainability issues, this includes our commitment as an organization to minimize our impact on the environment and climate. We have established an environmental management system based on the ISO 14001:2015 standard to help us achieve this.
The purpose of this environmental management system is to monitor and continuously improve our company’s environmental performance. In this way, we as an organization try to do our part to protect the environment and the climate. Our offices in Rotterdam, Sint-Niklaas and Namur are ISO 14001:2015 certified.
Since SBE is also certified to the ISO 9001:2015 standard, both standards are part of our integrated management system, which means they are based on the same principles
SBE has established several environmental objectives to improve our environmental performance and reduce our impact on the environment. These objectives focus on our three business activities that have the greatest environmental and climate impact:
Performing technical and hydraulic engineering projects are part of SBE’s core activities. During our project work, we therefore strive to reduce our impact on the environment and always focus on providing both quality and sustainable solutions.
To achieve this, we focus on making our customers aware of various environmental aspects and present them with options regarding environmentally friendly solutions through our SPIRIT sustainability questionnaire.
On the other hand, we also intend to increase environmental awareness among employees by offering environmental training, utilizing SPIRIT and expanding the knowledge domain around circular and sustainable design.
Our vehicle fleet accounts for about 75% of our total CO2 emissions and we are doing all we can to reduce this.
We want to achieve this by increasing sustainable travel (bikes, public transport, home office) on the one hand, while on the other hand we also encourage our employees to reduce work-related travel – whenever possible – by focusing on online/hybrid meetings.
Finally, we plan to gradually convert the vehicle fleet to an electric fleet and expand our charging infrastructure in the Sint-Niklaas office.
Consumption in our offices also affects our environmental performance. Various awareness campaigns are being organized to combat standby power consumption to reduce the harmful effects of our consumption on the environment. For the office under our own management in Sint-Niklaas, we switched to renewable energy by installing 458 solar panels. Finally, we are also fully committed to digitization.
Several actions are initiated annually around each of these most impactful business processes to achieve our environmental objectives.
