Taking Economic & Ecological Action

On Thursday, May 5, County Commissioner Christoph Rüther and Michael Hermanns, Department Head at the Ministry for the Environment, Agriculture, Nature Conservation and Consumer Protection of North Rhine-Westphalia, awarded the ECOPROFIT® certificate to the management consultancy UNITY and nine other companies. In order to attain this, UNITY participated in the ÖKOPROFIT® program for one year in advance and established an environmental management system. With concrete measures, UNITY successfully demonstrated how, for example, electricity, water and gas can be saved and waste can be reduced. Many of the measures taken have also had a positive effect on the operational result.

For example, UNITY replaced the ventilation system of the building in Büren with a new, more ecological system with heat recovery and invested in a new air conditioning system with lower energy consumption. In addition, a photovoltaic system was installed, which provided savings of approximately 58,000 kWh of electricity as well as 28 tons of CO₂ in the first year. Another measure for more sustainability is the change to using local/ regional products in the office cafeteria. There are also plans to install twelve charging stations, each with two charging points for e-vehicles, in the employee parking lot this year.

"Profitability and sustainability are by no means conflicting goals," says Christoph Plass, member of the Executive Board at UNITY. "If you want to be successful in the long term, you can only do so in terms of sustainability. We demonstrate this with our ÖKOPROFIT® certification, using UNITY itself as an example – but also with our Carbon Footprint consulting service in which we support companies in their transformation toward greater sustainability."