Sustainability blog series: Leaping towards a sustainable future
As the world grapples with the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation, it has become increasingly important to leverage innovation and technology to enhance sustainability. The EU has taken a significant step in this direction with its ambitious European Green Deal, aiming to make Europe the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
The EU Green New Deal is a comprehensive and transformative plan designed to guide Europe’s transition to a sustainable and resilient economy. By promoting clean energy, sustainable transport, energy efficiency, and circular economy practices, the Green New Deal is driving innovation and technology adoption across various sectors.
In this blog post we will explore how we as Genexis are working on sustainable innovation and in which projects we are participating to take the leap to the future.
An important step of this leap is the introduction of standardization and putting that into practice. Two examples where we as Genexis actively contribute are the Code of Conduct on energy consumption of broadband equipment, and the industry-specific product category rules for Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). Because we believe that participation in industry standardization helps with the prompt elevation of technology and innovation for sustainability. With a good understanding of associated matters, we can anticipate future regulations and start investigating the environmental impact of specific measures. With this, we can conceptualize new & alternative solutions and deliver fitting products aligned with the global climate agenda.
Projecting these incoming standards, regulations, and proposals in product creation is an important next step. As a starting point, Genexis commits to deliver product circularity reports for all new products being launched from the 1st of January 2024. We will derive a basic report from the Circular Transition Indicators (v4.0) and expand with support from external stakeholders over time as data collection today is still an effortful job. This report will be aligned with the upcoming EPD format, so we are prepared for the next steps. In addition, Genexis also strives to create a fully circular product by 2025. This goal helps to better understand the definition of ‘fully circular’ and stimulates innovation when discovering all our opportunities. We will start with the basics and have circular material flows first. Then we can commit to reducing emissions throughout the value chain and minimizing greenhouse gas emissions for each product’s life cycle.
Design for circularity is a fundamental principle that supports the circular economy concept. It involves designing products and systems with the intent of maximizing responsible resource efficiency, minimizing waste, and enabling easy disassembly and recycling. We aim for easier and quicker dismantling of products with fewer parts and smart (dis)assembly features, without compromising other requirements such as product strength. If carefully executed, this generates economic value in repairing or refurbishing, and with that devaluation of the product can be prevented. Other practical examples would be that we maximize ventilation areas to extend the product’s lifetime and we make sure new products can be compatible with existing deployments as much as possible. With such measures, we believe that our products can be designed for circularity and hopefully, we will learn more about it through our circularity reports in the coming years.
Essentially, we benefit from understanding the concepts of new regulations and how those will affect our product offering. To be well in time Genexis also explores opportunities through partnerships and collaboration within our value chain, and also knowledge institutes. Ideally, we proactively share our growing know-how with all stakeholders, because that helps steer innovation for the purpose of CO2 footprint reduction in our products. In the end, we want to provide more insights and help make more sustainable choices.
Author: Mr. Olivier van Duuren