on sustainability
“We are convinced that sustainable business is good business.”
An Saveyn,
Sustainability Manager
Thomas Serbruyns,
VP Strategic Initiatives
Ann Desender,
Chief Financial Officer
A focus on sustainable business is no longer the terrain of some niche companies. In the past decade, it found its way into the hearts and minds of many organizations and industries – sometimes voluntarily, sometimes driven by legislation. Barco recognized the importance of sustainability rather early on, taking actions to lower our ecological impact. Ann Desender (CFO), Thomas Serbruyns (VP Strategic Initiatives) and An Saveyn (Sustainability Manager) talk about the sustainability road so far, the company’s ambitions and the challenges in remaining transparent.
Actually, we were early adopters in our industry. Although environmental sustainability has been high on the agenda for the typical ‘high-polluting’ companies, for example, in the chemical and oil sectors or large in the B2C corporations). It was only at that time that the first wake-up calls started happening in other industries.
It was when an important customer asked us to report our carbon emissions through Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), that we started realizing and measuring the room for improvement. Because we recognized the importance of this topic, we started drawing up an action plan – first led by enthusiastic volunteers paving the way and creating awareness, then more formally by hiring a full-time sustainability manager. In this way, we gradually gained professionalism.
Based on feedback from our customers, employees, investors, suppliers, (non-) governmental organizations and the Barco leadership, we came up with a list of topics that matter most to our stakeholders and defined how we could achieve the greatest impact. We grouped these into 3 pillars: Planet, People and Communities.
In the Planet pillar, climate change is an important topic. It’s no surprise that we started off by investigating the possible CO2 reduction in our own operations. The obvious first steps were limiting energy consumption (and further investing in sustainable energy) and making the switch in logistics from air to sea transportation.
The second step was limiting the impact of our products. For this, we needed to onboard the product managers. We wanted to give them a tool to score their products in a uniform way, mapping all the different areas of sustainability. Unfortunately, no such tool existed that we could use throughout Barco. Most scoring mechanisms focused on one specific aspect (e.g. energy consumption) or one type of product.
That is why we decided to create our own ecoscoring methodology, validated by Ernst & Young. This ecoscore has become a vital tool in our sustainability strategy and is gaining traction both within and outside of our company.
The Financial Times have included Barco in the 2022 edition of their Europe Climate Leaders list, among other European companies recognized for their commitment and actions to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
environmental footprint?
Put simply, we are convinced that sustainable business is good business. Along the way, legislation has forced companies to become more sustainable, but we were always ahead of this, with targets far more ambitious than the law prescribes.
The covid-19 pandemic was bad for Barco on a business level, but the resulting travel restrictions did allow us to severely reduce the travel footprint of our employees. On the other hand, it also resulted in a shortage of ocean transportation capacity, which meant that we were forced to use air transport more than we wanted to. The same goes for technology switches. The transition from lamp to laser light sources drastically decreased the power consumption of our products. Other evolutions in both technology and market behavior increased energy use. So it seems that there is a balance between windfalls and setbacks.
Greenwashing is indeed the bane of sustainability efforts. Doctoring or inflating results is not even that hard to do: by selecting KPIs that are hard to verify, companies can greenwash their performance without many problems. To counter this, we have subscribed to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), so our carbon reduction target is formally checked and approved by a third-party organization first. The goal is to be in line with a global warming scenario of 1.5 degrees.
Next to that, we are also evaluated by a number of leading sustainability rating agencies (including Sustainalytics, MSCI, Ecovadis, etc.). We communicate transparently about these scores and rankings in our annual report and on our website.
Yes. Although there was an active interest from the start, we do notice that sustainable thinking is now part of the company DNA – in every layer of our structure. Next year’s bonus targets now include sustainability KPIs. We think this is the most tangible thing an organization can do to show they are serious about sustainability.
“We are convinced that sustainable business is good business.”
on sustainability
An Saveyn,
Sustainability Manager
Thomas Serbruyns,
VP Strategic Initiatives
Ann Desender,
Chief Financial Officer
A focus on sustainable business is no longer the terrain of some niche companies. In the past decade, it found its way into the hearts and minds of many organizations and industries – sometimes voluntarily, sometimes driven by legislation. Barco recognized the importance of sustainability rather early on, taking actions to lower our ecological impact. Ann Desender (CFO), Thomas Serbruyns (VP Strategic Initiatives) and An Saveyn (Sustainability Manager) talk about the sustainability road so far, the company’s ambitions and the challenges in remaining transparent.
Actually, we were early adopters in our industry. Although environmental sustainability has been high on the agenda for the typical ‘high-polluting’ companies, for example, in the chemical and oil sectors or large in the B2C corporations). It was only at that time that the first wake-up calls started happening in other industries.
It was when an important customer asked us to report our carbon emissions through Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), that we started realizing and measuring the room for improvement. Because we recognized the importance of this topic, we started drawing up an action plan – first led by enthusiastic volunteers paving the way and creating awareness, then more formally by hiring a full-time sustainability manager. In this way, we gradually gained professionalism.
Based on feedback from our customers, employees, investors, suppliers, (non-) governmental organizations and the Barco leadership, we came up with a list of topics that matter most to our stakeholders and defined how we could achieve the greatest impact. We grouped these into 3 pillars: Planet, People and Communities.
In the Planet pillar, climate change is an important topic. It’s no surprise that we started off by investigating the possible CO2 reduction in our own operations. The obvious first steps were limiting energy consumption (and further investing in sustainable energy) and making the switch in logistics from air to sea transportation.
The second step was limiting the impact of our products. For this, we needed to onboard the product managers. We wanted to give them a tool to score their products in a uniform way, mapping all the different areas of sustainability. Unfortunately, no such tool existed that we could use throughout Barco. Most scoring mechanisms focused on one specific aspect (e.g. energy consumption) or one type of product.
That is why we decided to create our own ecoscoring methodology, validated by Ernst & Young. This ecoscore has become a vital tool in our sustainability strategy and is gaining traction both within and outside of our company.
Put simply, we are convinced that sustainable business is good business. Along the way, legislation has forced companies to become more sustainable, but we were always ahead of this, with targets far more ambitious than the law prescribes.
environmental footprint?
The Financial Times have included Barco in the 2022 edition of their Europe Climate Leaders list, among other European companies recognized for their commitment and actions to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The covid-19 pandemic was bad for Barco on a business level, but the resulting travel restrictions did allow us to severely reduce the travel footprint of our employees. On the other hand, it also resulted in a shortage of ocean transportation capacity, which meant that we were forced to use air transport more than we wanted to. The same goes for technology switches. The transition from lamp to laser light sources drastically decreased the power consumption of our products. Other evolutions in both technology and market behavior increased energy use. So it seems that there is a balance between windfalls and setbacks.
Greenwashing is indeed the bane of sustainability efforts. Doctoring or inflating results is not even that hard to do: by selecting KPIs that are hard to verify, companies can greenwash their performance without many problems. To counter this, we have subscribed to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), so our carbon reduction target is formally checked and approved by a third-party organization first. The goal is to be in line with a global warming scenario of 1.5 degrees.
Next to that, we are also evaluated by a number of leading sustainability rating agencies (including Sustainalytics, MSCI, Ecovadis, etc.). We communicate transparently about these scores and rankings in our annual report and on our website.
Yes. Although there was an active interest from the start, we do notice that sustainable thinking is now part of the company DNA – in every layer of our structure. Next year’s bonus targets now include sustainability KPIs. We think this is the most tangible thing an organization can do to show they are serious about sustainability.