Carbon footprint, ECOPROFIT, and eco-friendly transport:
Environmental measures at our offices
Sustainability is not only a feature of DZ BANK’s core business. We also try to minimize our impact on the environment at our offices.
Continuous improvement in environmental performance
DZ BANK’s aim is to keep the environmental impact of its business activities to a minimum. Environmental experts at DZ BANK are relentlessly utilizing this potential, thereby helping to shrink our environmental footprint and cut costs.
We set ourselves medium-term targets as part of our sustainability program that help us to progressively improve our environmental footprint. Based on specific environmental targets, the environmental management system enables us to determine meaningful key figures which we use in our continuous monitoring of environmental pollution. Our overarching objectives for environmental protection in the bank include optimizing the consumption of resources, making greater use of renewable energies, and thereby reducing our direct and indirect CO2 emissions.
In September 2021, the companies in the DZ BANK Group set themselves a new ecological target and are now including other Scope 3 emission sources when calculating their CO2 emissions. More about our climate strategy here.
DZ BANK is an ECOPROFIT member company
DZ BANK is a member of the ECOPROFIT club in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. Its two main office buildings have held ECOPROFIT certification for a number of years now. ECOPROFIT, the ECOlogical PROject For Integrated environmental Technology, is a Germany-wide project that aims to systematically promote environmental management in companies and municipal establishments. Besides environmental and economic objectives, ECOPROFIT also focuses on social aspects, such as making employees aware of environmental protection in the workplace and motivating them to do their bit.
Environmentally friendly travel
Travel is essential to our work. As a central institution, we support about 850 independent cooperative banks – which includes making on-site visits. In the future, we will try even harder to avoid trips with a large carbon footprint, use video conferences, and increase train travel. This last point is particularly important because, since April 2013, our employees have been making all of their long-distance train journeys on a carbon neutral rail tariff.
We are also pushing ahead with e-mobility: A rapid charging point for electric vehicles has been available to customers and visitors at our Frankfurt office since 2014. In 2018, we launched an electric vehicles pilot project. During the first phase of the project, up to ten company cars will replaced by electric-powered cars. New vehicles will be purchased for this project and charging points will be installed in the underground car park of our Westend 1 building. In addition, one vehicle from our company fleet in Düsseldorf which has reached the end of its useful life will be replaced with a purely electric-powered vehicle.
DZ BANK also supports all staff who regularly take public transport to work, by providing a travel allowance. At most of our major offices, we offer our employees a subsidized travel card for the local public transport network. We also have an agreement with Deutsche Bahn under which employees who live outside local public transport zones can travel to work by train, and therefore with reduced environmental impact, at reduced rates. In 2019, around 70 percent of our staff used public transportation to get to work. For the large number of employees who cycle to work, we offer bike parking facilities. Our Pavillon Cityhaus II building, for example, has underground storage for around 140 bikes, with 10 percent of its capacity suitable for e-bikes.
