We are a climate-neutral company - retroactively to 2006, the year our company was founded. On this page, you can find out more about climate neutrality and the projects our company support.

You can find even more information on our other sustainability pages:

We’ve taken small steps in the past to become more sustainable as a company. However, we have reached a point where we began to wonder whether those small steps are still enough. The answer to this question came up very quickly and couldn’t be clearer: It is time to take a decisive step forward. This was evident within our company as well. Colleagues have repeatedly expressed the desire to increase and strengthen our commitment to climate protection.

In principle, a company is climate neutral if all CO2 emissions are balanced. When it comes to greenhouse gases like CO2, it is the overall balance in the atmosphere that is important, which is why the emissions we produce in Germany can be offset by reducing emissions elsewhere. This does not lead to a further increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

CCF stands for Corporate Carbon Footprint. This shows the amount of carbon emissions produced in one year by one particular company. In our case, these emissions would be generated by parcels being sent back and forth, operating servers and colleagues commuting to work by car, bus or train.

The first step was to determine how high our CO2 emissions actually were - which was not an easy task. Every employee had to fill out a questionnaire, and we put everything to the test, including heating, carpooling, water consumption - everything. A particularly interesting part of this evaluation was retroactively calculating our emissions for the years since our founding. The basis for this was data we had on hand, namely the number of parcels we shipped during that time. The tests confirmed what we had already suspected: The principal drivers of our CO2 emissions were not only shipping and returns but our facilities and us, the Bergfreunde employees.

Of course, the first goal should be to reduce your own CO2 emissions as much as possible. We have done this in the past by using green energy and implementing a photovoltaic system, improving warehouse systems, reducing the amount of air in parcels and offering our employees the option of leasing a bike. Unfortunately, there is a large amount of emissions in the online retail industry that are more difficult to reduce: Trucks with combustion engines transport our products throughout the country, and employees who live further away depend on their cars to get to work.

One way to improve the CO2 balance is to offset greenhouse gases. By purchasing certain certificates, projects that minimise greenhouse gases can be financed all over the world. This can be done by means of afforestation or by supporting development aid projects that improve the living conditions of people in poorer regions of the world, e.g. by establishing water filters so that water no longer has to be boiled on open fire.The basis for offsetting our emissions is the carbon footprint balance sheet. We have been preparing this annually since 2018 with the support of ClimatePartner, following the guidelines of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. It includes direct and indirect emissions (Scope 1-3) in all relevant categories according to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Merchandise is not taken into account. Below you can find our current carbon footprint balance sheet.

Of course, we can only offset and reduce carbon emissions if we regularly monitor the measures we’re taking. This means that annual audits have to continue to take place in order to ascertain how our carbon footprint is developing. The same applies to the projects we support and all the other measures we take as we implement our sustainability strategy.

Since 2018, we’ve been preparing annual carbon footprint balance sheets with the support of ClimatePartner, in which our recorded emissions are presented in detail. This forms the basis for offsetting our emissions, but above all it’s the start of all our reduction efforts.

In our 2020 carbon footprint balance sheet for example, we’ve noticed that our employees’ commute to the office created lots of emissions. As a result, we’ve decided to make the workplaces more flexible and allow our employees to work from home more frequently.

We’ve decided to focus on projects that help where we, or our products’ producers, cause emissions. In addition, the projects we selected are TÜV-certified (the German Technical Inspection Association) and are in line with the Gold Standard established by the WWF and 40 other NGOs. These projects have been shown to reduce greenhouse gases and at the same time benefit the local environment and the population’s social needs.

Want to learn more about sustainability at Bergfreunde? Then head to our sustainability page to find out more on our background and goals.

If you have any questions about Bergfreunde’s sustainability strategy, you can contact the sustainability team for more information.