Sustainability is a focus topic for us in the network. Essentially, this also includes making sustainable measures and sustainable commitment visible, even if a company is not (yet) required to report. Our organization began preparing its first Sustainability Code report with the project “Sustainable supplier management according to the Sustainability Code standard – a purchasing pool on the way to a sustainability report” (NaLiMa for short), which was funded from September 2021 to September 2022 by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection to “promote model projects for the development of forward-looking cluster concepts and innovative business models” as part of the “go-cluster” programme. Now we are once again represented in the Code database with our latest report for the 2023 reporting year.
One of the focal points of this report is the development of a strategy for network work, which we went through together with the involvement of various stakeholders. There were team workshops, online meetings with stakeholder groups to shape our network work, the NIRO General Assembly and our Executive Board collaborated on this and a new vision was formulated for NIRO: “Our vision is to create attractive, liveable, technology-open, future-proof and sustainable working environments in our network in the eastern Ruhr region as a production location.”
This created a new image for our network work, which is implemented under sustainable aspects in the opportunity spaces “Working together”, “Sharing knowledge” and “Shopping together”. In addition, there is our real event space in Dortmund harbor. The Sustainability Code is free of charge and offers an introduction to sustainability reporting based on a clear structure. A Sustainability Code declaration covers a total of 20 individual criteria from the four areas of strategy, process management, environment and society. This includes a set of quantifiable performance indicators. It is therefore necessary to compile numerous facts and figures in order to fill out the declaration.
The German Sustainability Code Office checks the declaration for formal completeness. The users then receive qualified feedback. Any ambiguities, questionable or missing information must be eliminated, resolved or subsequently submitted in correction rounds.
Once it has been successfully reviewed and formally complete, the Sustainability Code declaration is stored in the Sustainability Code database. The publicly accessible Sustainability Code database generates visibility and now contains over 1,000 declarations. The published reports can be compared with each other. The declarations make companies’ sustainability efforts visible and comparable.
NIRO’s Sustainability Code declaration for the 2023 reporting year can also be found in the Sustainability Code database.
