New sector environmental labelling
Active environmental work is a necessity for Coor’s many environmentally aware customers. For many years, Coor has been accumulating substantial knowledge and has been testing a range of solutions and concepts that mitigate the impact its service provision has on the environment. Coor is now launching unique environmental labelling covering the whole service management process – Coor Green Services.
Nowadays, environmental consideration isn’t just a special interest for a committed audience. Nowadays, it involves a complete chain of stakeholders – customers, employees, financiers and finally the consumer – who set standards on companies to work actively on environmental issues and for manufactured products being environmental. Clear environmental standards apply to many tendering processes, and compliance with laws and ordinances is no longer just a matter for the authorities.
Comprehensive environmental labelling
There’s a lot to do on the environmental side in the service management sector. But the environmental measures taken until now have been highly fragmented and directed by the customer. Coor is the first service management provider to take an overall grasp of environmental matters and will be offering its customers completely new environmental labelling, Coor Green Cervices, covering the complete service management provision process.
“It really feels great to be able to introduce comprehensive environmental labelling,” says Bengt Håkansson, Executive Vice President of Coor Service Management in Sweden. “We’ve been working actively on environmental matters with our customers for a long time, but by aggregating and structuring our experiences and knowledge, we’ll be able to help our customers minimize their environmental impact much more effectively.”
Being a service management provider with a broad offering is a prerequisite for being able to take comprehensive and overarching environmental responsibility. Where single service providers put a focus on their own product or service, Coor looks at the big picture of the complete service management operation.
“Our provision of complete service management solutions means that environmental matters can be considered from a broader perspective. So we have better prospects of tracking the environmental measures that are possible for each specific customer. We’ve got the experience and knowledge necessary to design a credible and specialized environmental labelling system,” continues Bengt.
Two levels – silver and gold
There are two versions of the environmental label – silver and gold. To achieve either of the levels, the services included in service provision are evaluated from relevant environmental criteria, some of which are mandatory. To achieve the gold standard, an operation must generally satisfy all criteria, but for silver, it’s sufficient for operations to satisfy the mandatory criteria and half of the others. Gaining the gold standard should be difficult but not impossible. The evaluation tool is dynamic, enabling criteria to be tailored to progress over time. By adjusting the criteria and levels yearly, the Coor Green Services label becomes a true guarantee of environmental ambition.
“We’ll be taking a big responsibility for our environmental labelling. It’s crucial that there is real substance and a well-considered list of criteria behind this label. It’s the first of its class in the service sector – we’ll be doing what we can to ensure that it is also the best and most credible,” continues Bengt.
A symbol of progress
A broad roll-out of the labelling system is planned for 2010 within the framework of Coor’s scheduled continuous improvement work for customers. The scheme is already being piloted on some contracts to ensure that the criteria and levels that have been developed are appropriate. Coor has chosen to start with workplace services, but will be adding others in real estate production progressively. The ambition is that in time, Coor Green Services labelling will consider basically everything affecting sustainable development.
The symbol of Coor Green Services is an open hand and a leaf. The hand is intended to create an image of service provision, while the leaf is a symbol of the environment. This logo will be displayed in contexts where environmental standards have been satisfied.
“The degree to which provision satisfies the predetermined environmental standards should be clear to an employee, customer or other observer. At present, there is no good, relevant environmental labelling system in our sector. Our objective is to fill this space, and do it with labelling that really produces environmental and financial gains for our customers, and for our future together,” concludes Bengt.
If you’ve got any questions or want to find out more:
Contact Magdalena Rondahl, Environmental & Quality Manager at Coor, tel: +46 (0)8 553 95905, magdalena.rondahl@coor.com