YOUR FORUM FOR PLAY, SPORTS UND LEISURE AREAS
Tradition and progress that benefit the environment
eibe Produktion + Vertrieb GmbH & Co. KG, a manufacturer of children's playground equipment and furniture, has set itself the objective of helping children to develop normally, grow up in a positive fashion and come to understand their environment. The form and safety, ethical and ergonomic features of their products are designed to promote this. In effect, eibe immerses children in the natural world and invites them to be at ease, to marvel, to gain experience, test their skills and discover, through play, their own talents. It is because of this philosophy that eibe ensures that its products offer children not only educational challenges but also the best possible level of safety and quality. At the same time, eibe considers preservation of the environment to be one of the most important preconditions that will enable it to achieve its aims.
Playground@Landscape recently interviewed eibe's Technical Director, Peter Schnabel.
Thomas Müller (Playground@Landscape): Why are environmental and quality management eibe's top priorities?
Peter Schnabel (eibe): As a family-run firm with an incredibly long history, we are aware of how important it is to take our responsibilities towards coming generations seriously. And it is for this reason that we place such an emphasis on environmental resource and quality management. It was 17 years ago that we first decided to introduce a combined quality and environmental management system because we believed that this was an approach that would make sure that ecological awareness would become an established part of all our activities throughout the whole company.
P@L: Your numerous accreditations are evidence that customers can place their trust in eibe. Could you particularise them for us?
Peter Schnabel: We hold the TÜV certificate of compliance with EN 1176, meaning our products meet all the requirements of the relevant standards thus confirming, in particular, their safety.
Our products also bear the quality mark RAL-GZ 411 of the German quality association RAL that certifies that processed wood products meet certain specifications and that their quality is warranted for at least 10 years.
Our EMAS certification represents the EU seal of quality and by joining this scheme for sustainable eco-management, the most stringent in the world, we have undertaken to ensure continuous improvement of our systems and to provide insight into our environmental policy-relevant activities to the general public. There are only 34 timber-processing firms in Germany that hold EMAS accreditation.
ISO 14001 is a global environmental management standard that requires use of a 'planning - implementation - monitor- optimise' approach and provides us with worldwide accreditation of our environmental management system.
We are also a member of the 'Umweltpakt Bayern', the state-sponsored Bavarian environment pact. This is designed to promote the continuous improvement of the eco-protection policies of businesses based on appropriately tailored and efficient strategies that make use of the innovative capacity and experience of the commercial organisations themselves. Its primary aim is to anticipate and thus prevent activities that might damage the environment rather than just introduce remedial measures for pollution that has already occurred.
Our supply chain is fully FSC-certified; this means we can guarantee that all our products ‒ from forest to finished equipment ‒ are sustainable at all stages. Each certificate has a registered number to confirm its authenticity.
P@L: The environment is something that concerns all of us. Where does eibe see its specific responsibilities?
Peter Schnabel: All our activities conform to the legal requirements but we actually go much further. Our preventative measures include strategies for the avoidance of soil contamination, an emergency plan designed to come into effect in the event of natural disasters and the continuous upgrading of our environmental polic . And in this context, we consider it to be of particular importance to liaise closely with our customers, local residents and the relevant authorities.
We are continually working on reducing our level of emissions and on increasing our use of carbon-neutral fuels.
We have annual targets for the further reduction of our electricity and water consumption aimed at preserving sources of fossil energy. The same applies to our waste production, whereby we put a particular focus on reducing our output of hazardous waste.
When manufacturing our products, we aim to employ minimal amounts of resources and also strive to use environmentally-friendly materials and standardised components that can be reused whenever possible.
P@L: Product development and environmental awareness; how do you combine the two? What principles inform your development strategies?
Peter Schnabel: At eibe, we place considerable value on innovation and our development strategy takes a systematic approach to ensure our products are market-orientated and environmentally-friendly. Protection of the environment and sustainability are factors that we take into account at the product development stage. And we continue in this same vein when it comes to selecting materials to ensure they will enhance the life cycle of our products, taking into account aspects such as ease of disposal, recyclability, degradability and potential for re-use, while also making sure that we employ eco-friendly and renewable raw materials.
We mainly employ wood, a carbon-neutral, resource-conserving raw material. In order to meet our sustainability targets, we use not only eco-friendly, pressure-impregnated timber but also, for example, eucalyptus wood. This good quality hardwood grows rapidly in Europe and provides for sustainable value creation. We also use robinia wood that can be employed to construct outdoor equipment without the need for impregnation, other surface coatings or additional materials because of its excellent natural resilience.
P@L: All the timber you use you acquire exclusively from sustainably managed plantations. Why is this so important to you?
Peter Schnabel: It is because we ourselves are a timber-processing business with a long history that we feel obligated to take a more comprehensive view when it comes to our environment. We are committed to protecting the environment and our full FSC accreditation also shows that we obtain all our timber from sustainable forestry concerns in Europe. In other words, our customers can rest assured that we have no truck whatsoever with illegal logging, corruption and the use of child labour and are in no way involved in any violations of the basic principles and legal requirements that apply to the forestry sector.
P@L: It's clear that you set great store by the way you deal with resources and materials. How do you achieve your aims? Internal audits and regular inspections by the environmental agency?
Peter Schnabel: Internal audits and regular inspections certainly help us ensure the long term effectiveness of our corporate environmental protection strategies. But an environmental management system also needs the active collaboration of everyone involved if it is to be successful and for this reason we provide our personnel with a continuous flow of information, training courses and guidance to heighten their environmental awareness.
P@L: Could you give us a few facts and figures?
Peter Schnabel: Our policy with regard to the use of resources is applied in many different sectors. For example, we save energy costs and reduce our emissions by means of the use of heat recovery and direct air supplies. We are able to generate 95% of all the heat needed by the entire company from waste wood and chips left over from our own production activities; these are collected centrally in storage silos from which they are transported to the heating plant. We've increased our operating efficiency to shorten our transport routes and have invested in forklifts with integrated air filters to keep the air in our warehouses clean. In addition, we've replaced nearly all our diesel forklifts with electric forklifts and installed energy-saving lamps in all production and storage halls.
This demonstrates that the continuous improvement of our environment-related activities has already become a routine matter for us, while we plan to continue to introduce further improvements in future. At the same time, we endeavour to encourage our suppliers, business partners and customers to adopt a similar attitude.
Our commitment has not gone unnoticed and we are justifiably proud of the awards we have won recently, one of which is the Bavarian Quality Award. A well-functioning QM system is an essential requirement for any business that operates in the international marketplace. The Quality Award was created to emphasize just how important extensive quality orientation at all levels of a business can be and how this factor can provide for success, a competitive advantage and become a unique selling point in all commercial sectors. This award both confirms that our quality management system is effective and recognises all our efforts in this field.
We have also won a Green Apple Award for our involvement in a regeneration project in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. The award is presented by the UK's The Green Organisation.
P@L: So eibe really is number one when it comes to the environment. Just a few words in conclusion from you.
Peter Schnabel: We want our brand to be associated with the fact that we are top of the range when it comes to protecting the environment. Our various accreditations ‒ EMAS, FSC and RAL and of our environmental management system ‒ are proof of what we have achieved.
However, I must admit that when it comes to environmental awareness and sustainability in association with timber procurement, the Netherlands is still streets ahead of us. Although the same procurement guidelines have long been valid in Germany, we have yet to fully implement them.
But at eibe, we are aware that even in Germany ever greater emphasis is being placed on the concept of 'sustainable procurement'. The federal government and several of the states, such as Hamburg, Bremen and recently Baden-Württemberg, have adopted the principle of sustainable procurement as one of the core aspects of their policies. Many local authorities are still trailing behind, often simply because of ignorance but all too often because the decision-makers associate the word 'environment' with massive expenditure. So I'd like to conclude this interview by quoting John Ruskin:
"It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money ‒ that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot ‒ it can't be done."
Readers can download eibe's recent environment declaration using the following link:
http://www.eibe.de/media/pdf/eibe_umweltbroschuere.pdf
The interviewer was Thomas R. Müller (Playground@Landscape)
Photo: eibe
