SGS held Lower Carbon Day as part of its commitment to carbon neutrality

GENEVA, 4-9-2014 — /EuropaWire/ — As part of its commitment to carbon neutrality, SGS is holding a Lower Carbon Day. The internal event aims to encourage staff to take some time to think about the way our activities impact the planet, and what we can do to tackle these both at work and at home.

The company will be encouraging employees to calculate their own environmental footprints and sharing carbon saving tips. SGS locations around the world are celebrating with a series of events, such as tree-planting, local environment clean-ups, lower carbon meals, quizzes, competitions, green travel initiatives, and ‘Earth Hour’-style events.

SGS is dedicated to becoming 100% carbon neutral. The company has reduced its emissions through energy efficiency measures, sourcing renewable energy, and purchasing emission reduction units to offset the remaining greenhouse gas emissions associated with more than 90% of operations for 2013. The remaining 10% of emissions will be offset by the end of the year.

Daniel Rüfenacht, Vice President for Corporate Sustainability at SGS, explained how this is another step on the company’s sustainability journey: “Climate change is one of the most serious challenges of our time. Although SGS is not a particularly carbon-intensive company, we believe all organisations will have a role to play in tackling this issue.

“Carbon neutrality is the latest step in a journey that has seen our environmental programmes, such as energy efficiency in buildings, eco-efficient behaviour and green IT, produce significant savings in recent years.

“We hope going carbon neutral will raise awareness and encourage our employees to look for more opportunities to increase the energy efficiency of our operations. Today we are holding an international event within SGS called ‘Lower Carbon Day’ to celebrate our lower carbon initiatives, and help our employees reduce their own carbon footprints.”

For a full explanation of how SGS is going carbon neutral, please see the SGS Carbon Neutrality Statement (PDF 120 KB).

For further information, please contact:

Corporate Sustainability Team
1 Place des Alpes
P.O. Box 2152
Geneva, 1211
Switzerland
t: +41 22 739 91 11
f: +41 22 739 98 86

ABOUT SGS
SGS is the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company. SGS is recognized as the global benchmark for quality and integrity. With more than 80,000 employees, SGS operates a network of over 1,650 offices and laboratories around the world.

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