How we can transform our economy?

Have you heard of European Green Deal? It’s the name of a concept devised by the EU that views climate change as the most critical challenge of our time. The EU has set itself the goal of implementing a new economic model that’s more sustainable.

This new economic system is intended to help Europe become a climate-neutral continent within thirty years. You think that sounds ambitious? Well, it is. But it’s absolutely possible – and many young people think it’s also essential.

The new strategy envisages that the climate goals will be achieved by 2030 in a fair and cost-effective way whilst safeguarding competition. König + Neurath’s sustainability expert Johannes Brennig describes it like this: “There’s a social and political consensus that our economy urgently needs to change. The thing is, if development continues at this rate the global consumption of resources will reach a level equivalent to that of three Planet Earths by 2050. We need to take preventative action.”

As an industrial manufacturer, König + Neurath has a huge responsibility – and takes that very seriously. We’ve been working constantly on improving our environmental performance for many years. Furthermore we have defined specific environmentally friendly design requirements at product level. We call it “Design for the Environment”. This means taking into account important principles like scalability, lifespan, resource-friendly material use and recyclability of products as well as material recovery. Sustainable management is one of our core business management principles.

The EU Commission is aiming for a circular economy at product level and has drawn up the Circular Economy Action Plan to achieve this. This plan comprises different measures, which include the following and from which we derive questions for our manufacturing processes:

• How can we improve the product life cycle and durability?
• What do we need to produce consistently high-quality products with fewer resources and lower energy consumption?
• How can we increase the recycled content in products while maintaining performance and safety?
• How do we increase the recyclability of our products?
• What are we doing to reduce carbon and environmental footprints
• How do we take responsibility for the entire life cycle?
• How do we digitise product information?
• What labels do we use to demonstrate the sustainability performance of our products?

The European Green Deal aims to safeguard a good and healthy life both for us and for future generations. This encompasses:

• clean air, clean water, healthy soil and biodiversity
• buildings renovated for energy efficiency
• healthy, affordable food
• more public transport
• clean energy and state-of-the-art clean technologies
• products with longer lifecycles that can be repaired, recycled and reused
• future-proof workstations and training to ensure people have the skills needed for this transition
• a competitive, crisis-proof industry on a global scale

Let us work on this together! You can read more about our commitment to sustainability in the interview with our sustainability expert Johannes Brennig.

We used the following sources for this article:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/de/ip_20_420
https://germanwatch.org/de/18444

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_de#thematicareas

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/european-green-deal-communication_de.pdf

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:9903b325-6388-11ea-b735-01aa75ed71a1.0016.02/DOC_1&format=PDF