Ambitious goals for a sustainable future

2019 was a momentous year for us: we rolled out Strategy 2025 and enunciated our purpose as “pioneering solutions to the world’s water and climate challenges and improving quality of life for people”. We move forward with an even greater determination to solve these challenges through the continual development of energy-efficient and intelligent water solutions.

We also put an even stronger emphasis on sustainability, where we have set up concrete and measurable goals for ourselves.

One of these goals is to reduce our water consumption and CO₂ emissions by 50% by 2025, as compared with 2008 levels. In the 2019 Sustainability report we articulated our efforts to reach these particular goals along with our other targets, results, and challenges that we came across in our journey so far.  
 

Some of the report’s highlights:
Reductions of 10.4% since 2018 and 41% compared with baseline (2008), put us in a strong position to reach our ambition to halve consumption by 2025. We also reduced our energy consumption and CO2 by 9.4%, and 12.2% respectively compared with 2018 and 20% and 40% compared with 2008.

Thanks to thoughtful initiatives and hard work by all Grundfos employees over this past year, lost-time injuries decreased by 27% while employee satisfaction increased by two points compared with 2018. As of 2019, we can also be very proud that 3.2% of our employees are people with reduced work capacity.

Through our business partnerships, approximately 850,000 people received access to clean water. In one Ugandan village where they installed AQTaps, the rate of waterborne diseases hitting children under five fell by 65%.

Furthermore, employees donated more than 390,000 DKK to our employee-driven programme, the Water2Life, which is currently bringing clean water to communities in need in Honduras.

Environmental Responsibility
We continually aim to minimise the footprint of our operations. Over the past year, we reduced our CO2 emissions by 12.2%, our energy consumption by 9.4%, and our water consumption by 10.4%, compared with 2018.

In 2019, all of our suppliers were screened using social and environmental criteria, and supplier audits showed that compliance has increased from 17% in 2017 to 84% in 2019.

Purpose-Driven Business
We want to continually translate our sustainability commitments into concrete value propositions for customers. Grundfos employees are working  to make our offerings increasingly sustainable – from the earliest stages of product design to their end of life. It’s also why we launched the new Safe Water strategic business unit and invested 4% of our turnover in 2019 in developing new products, technology, and solutions.

To accelerate focus and accountability for realising our goals, we have created a Sustainability Index. It consists of 10 concrete measuring points of our sustainability progress towards our social responsibility, climate, and water management ambitions.