It is also important to us to pay attention to ecological sustainability in our everyday office life. We do not just want to shape change politically, but of course we also play our part in a very practical way.
This begins with the furnishing of our offices: we have bought a lot of our furniture second-hand. For our daily needs, we favour sustainable mail order companies, stationery and cleaning products and prefer to have our orders delivered by cargo bike. From notepads to business cards, we use recycled paper without exception and our employees are encouraged to do without Fineliner and use pencils instead. We also print very little and use only two printers for 13 workstations. One of these is an inkjet printer, which uses significantly fewer resources and energy.
We pay attention to energy efficiency and reparability for all technical devices. We use laptops instead of desktops because they use less material and consume less energy. When they slow down over time, we have them upgraded or recycled. Overall, we use all equipment as long as possible.
We reduce stand-by consumption with timers and socket strips that can be switched off. Electronic thermostats regulate our heating energy consumption at night and on weekends.
Our office kitchen is equipped exclusively with organic products, oat milk has already taken over for a long time cow’s milk in terms of popularity. For office parties, we generally only order organic catering and deliberately avoid offering meat dishes.
We try to avoid rubbish by using refillable products, continuing to use one-sided printed paper as notepaper and by taking the reusable container with us when we get lunch. Of course, we also separate the waste that is still generated in the office.
We purchase our electricity from a green electricity provider.
Outside the offices we also try to keep our CO₂ footprint as small as possible. Employees are encouraged to cycle to work and are reimbursed for the cost of using public transport. Business trips within Germany are only undertaken by train. We try to avoid long distance travel. Since this is not always possible, especially in the context of our international evaluation assignments, we use synergies whenever possible.
Certainly, there is still room for improvement. However, we believe that it is better to give our best every day and possibly make sacrifices in the process than to strive for perfection and go crazy with unattainable targets. We strive to continuously improve our work processes and are thus moving step by step towards a resource-saving, sustainable future.