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Environment

Our impacts

Environmental protection is an increasingly important concern for all stakeholders, including customers, employees and investors.

A business like ours has a range of direct and indirect environmental impacts. These vary from those impacts associated with the sourcing of raw materials, through manufacturing and operational impacts, to distribution, consumer use and disposal.

The nature of our products and services means that we do not have major, direct environmental impacts. Our operational footprint is relatively small compared to heavy manufacturing industries and the high quality of the materials and craftsmanship that go into our products means that they are used over a long period of time and are frequently passed from one generation to another. This naturally lessens the negative environmental impacts associated with the disposal of our products.

Nonetheless we consistently seek to reduce those impacts that we do have. We manage the indirect impacts in our supply chain through our Supplier Code of Conduct (see Supply chain section). For managing our direct impacts, we are guided by our Environmental Code of Conduct.

Our approach

Our Environmental Code of Conduct, which is part of our Corporate Social Responsibility Guidelines, is built on national and international norms and standards for environmental management. Besides tackling universal environmental issues such as energy, water, waste and emissions, our code addresses industry-specific items such as the environmental impacts of leather product production.

Our manufacturing operations are principally located in Switzerland, France and Germany. As such, they are strictly controlled by some of the most stringent environmental laws and regulations.

Performance in 2007/08

Richemont has taken a number of steps to build on the progress made last year to improve its environmental performance. We have undertaken our second carbon audit to measure our carbon footprint. This has been delivered alongside improvements to our data collection and reporting processes. We have extended the scope of our measurement to include water consumption data.

Our global ‘carbon footprint’ showed although our emissions had increased in absolute terms, factoring in the growth of our business, we had actually improved our energy efficiency per employee.

Thanks to these environmental key performance indicators, we are improving our understanding of our environmental footprint and where to focus our efforts. The sharing of this information with companies around the Group has heightened awareness and has already led to improvements. We will continue our efforts in that direction.

This year, we have also been working with an independent specialist environmental consultancy to improve the environmental management systems in some of our Maisons.

The Group’s Real Estate department is more systematically incorporating environmental assessments into major new building projects. Through this proactive approach we hope to be at the forefront of energy efficiency in new buildings in the Group.

We continue to work towards our aim to become fully carbon neutral in those company operations we directly own or control by 2009. Our focus is on increasing energy efficiency and we will offset the remaining CO₂ generated through the purchase of carbon credits.

There have been no environmental prosecutions resulting in either monetary or non-monetary sanctions during this reporting period.

Engaging our employees

Communication and engagement with our employees is a key element of our programme of environmental activity. This year has seen nearly all of our Maisons engage their staff directly on environment themes in a variety of ways. These range from communications on environmental good practice at work to encouraging staff to use public transport through company subsidised public transport or cycle-to-work schemes.

We have also developed a leaflet which has been issued to every employee across the Group on the theme of climate change. Produced in eight languages, the leaflet is designed to inform and engage our staff so that they feel they can better understand the issues surrounding climate change, the strategy and actions we are taking as a company and importantly, what they can do to help. We will be encouraging staff to take simple, practical steps at home and at work including remembering to switch off computers, and turning down the thermostat on heating systems, as well as switching off appliances and lights when not required.

We also invited Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, a leader in the field of environmental science to speak at the Group’s Management Conference in June 2007. His presentation on the topic of climate change was extremely well received and provoked a lot of interest amongst the senior management group.