Between sustainability goals and economic efficiency – the introduction of an environmental management system

Wildau – Germany, October 2024 – TACHOfresh, provider of intelligent solutions for digital tachographs, has been awarded the Brandenburg Environmental Seal for its operational efforts in the field of environmental protection and sustainability

The Brandenburg Environmental Label is a regional and compact environmental management system. It is aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that want to prevent environmental damage and improve their environmental performance in production, products or services. It therefore represents a unique opportunity, especially for SMEs, to examine all environmentally relevant company processes in an audit conducted by chambers of industry and commerce, crafts and trade, to identify potential for improvement and to sustainably optimise the ecological footprint of their own business activities.

Since 2023, TACHOfresh has begun to focus more intensively on the topic of sustainability and environmental protection internally. The interest in this topic came primarily from the management and had a dual focus: what can we do with our employees to improve our ecological footprint and what do we as an SME have to do in the long term to fulfil legal requirements. It quickly became clear that the topic of environmental protection and sustainability requires not only committed participation but also support from professionals.

‘After dealing with the topic of operational sustainability, we had more questions than answers,’ recalls Dr Susanne Kirsch, CEO of TACHOfresh GmbH. ‘Introducing an environmental management system, drawing up a carbon footprint, creating a hazardous substances register – what exactly do we have to implement and by when? And what should we do because it is simply important to us? It was more by chance that the Cottbus Chamber of Industry and Commerce drew our attention to the Brandenburg Environmental Label, which helps smaller companies like ours to set up a simple environmental management system.’

‘In a process lasting several months, we worked our way from the big to the small,’ summarises Magdalena Tokarek, Environmental Protection and Sustainability Officer at TACHOfresh. ‘It was difficult and, above all, time-consuming to scrutinise processes relevant to environmental protection for suitable key figures, integrate them into an environmental protection management system and use them as a yardstick for improvements.’

As a software company, TACHOfresh GmbH essentially has an office operation with a corresponding environmental impact, a web-based software product for which very large amounts of data are stored and processed in a certified data centre, and purchasing and sales processes for telematics hardware. The core areas of the environmental management system therefore relate to energy consumption (gas/electricity), water, travelling, waste flows/recycling.

‘In a process lasting several months, we spoke to all departments and collected facts in order to develop suitable key figures,’ says Kirsch. ’The valuable advice from our consultant from the Brandenburg Environmental Label was particularly important – not least on the subject of hazardous substances, which we had completely underestimated.’

The time had finally come in October. The audit of the TACHOfresh environmental management system by the IHK and the HWK Cottbus was successfully completed and the Brandenburg environmental seal was ceremoniously presented to Dr Kirsch by Dr Schöttker from the IHK Cottbus on 23.10.2024 on the premises of TACHOfresh GmbH.