STAFF in Peterborough have been singled out for particular praise for their contribution to reducing Coloplast’s ‘carbon footprint’.

The Danish parent company has published its first-ever ‘corporate responsibility report’ showing how it tackles ethical business issues ranging from quality control to protecting the environment.

Coloplast’s corporate responsibility report has been written in accordance with the international standard GRI (Global Reporting Initiative). It covers the period from November 2008 to the start of March 2010. In future, Coloplast will publish the report annually in November at the same time as its financial statement.

Coloplast HR director Tess O’Kane said, “We take all aspects of our corporate social responsibility very seriously and we always have done. In 2002, Coloplast signed the UN Global Compact declaration and since then we have been a member of the Dow Jones sustainability index and the FTSE4Good index.

“In the past, though, we have tended to report only internally on much of our social and environmental activity.

“With growing interest in such topics among customers, staff and investors we thought the time was now right to publicise our performance indicators for all these aspects of our business. In future we will produce them alongside our financial results, emphasising that both sets of figures are extremely important.

“I am pleased to say that staff in Peterborough have played a major role in delivering excellent results in all the areas of social responsibility on which we are reporting, not least in our environmental performance.”

Arif Karim, manager of Coloplast’s distribution operations in Peterborough, explained some of the initiatives that the company has introduced. He said, “All our cardboard packaging is now made from sustainable forest products, we recycle all the pallets on which materials arrive, and we have signed up to the Valpak packaging recovery and recycling scheme.

“We have driven down our energy use in the distribution centre year after year by doing simple things like turning off equipment that is not in use, turning off heating and lighting when it is not required, and buying more energy-efficient hardware such as computers and printers.

“Now we are working with our suppliers on new ideas.

“For example, each year we deliver thousands of medical products directly to end users in their homes. We are experimenting to see if our customers can return the more specialised packaging to us through the post so that it can be reused.”

Coloplast’s corporate responsibility report can be downloaded from http://www.coloplast.com/About/news/Documents/CR_Report.pdf