Coface Goes Green: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Being leader on the credit risk management market represents for Coface Romania a satisfaction and a challenge at the same time - to act responsibly towards both the environment and the society, where the company operates.

Coface Romania’s employees are now able to collect for recycling: light bulbs, batteries, electronics, printer cartridges and paper.

Within the company's offices, there were installed boxes and containers with a special design destined for the gathering of supplies in order to motivate the employees to actively participate in the environment’s protection. 

Social Responsibility in Coface Romania represents the way it conducts its business in relation to its shareholders and society. This means that any manager or employee must leads and works keeping in mind the principles of social responsibility and the fact that the involvement in homologous projects is one of Coface’s values.

Involvement in the „Green Corner” program, in partnership with Recolamp Association 

Since June, Coface Romania and Recolamp started the "Green Corner", a program developed nationwide, involving over 8,600 companies. 

The objective of the specially designed containers is to collect used electronic equipment, batteries, light bulbs and neon, in order to be recycled by a specialized center. 

Within 4 months of the project, Coface Romania managed to collect over 200 light bulbs/ neon, batteries and electronic equipment (keyboard, mouse, speakers, microphones etc.).

Thus, Coface Romania aims to promote among employees a responsible behavior towards the environment and society.

Recycling printer cartridges, in partnership with Ateliere Fara Frontiere Association 

Because printed materials that reach Coface’s clients or debtors have a considerable size and one of Coface Romania’s values is social involvement, the company proposed to collect both non-confidential paper and printer cartridges. 

For recycling the cartridges, Coface started a partnership with Ateliere fara Frontiere Association that processes them by ecological incineration.

Since June, there were collected 50 printer cartridges. 

Because they want to become more responsible in terms of environment, Coface Romania’s employees mobilized to collect the non-confidential paper and store it in boxes that have been placed for this purpose in each department. 

One box can store up to 25 pounds of paper and recycling the paper from 2 boxes can save a tree.

In four months since the project was started, Coface Romania managed to save 20 trees. 

ECO Code of Conduct - distributed to each Coface’s employee 

Another action that supports the CSR policy is the ECO Code of Conduct, developed internally and distributed to the entire Coface’s team.

Its purpose is to ensure the fulfillment of responsibility towards society and the environment, to bring into the employees’ attention practices that can generate, through their involvement, not just long-term results, but an attitude. 

The guide contains ECO - recommendations for home, shopping, leisure, travel and work, which can be useful to each team member of Coface Romania, both at home and at work. 

Examples of recommendations:

• For home:
  • Closing the faucet during teeth washing or shower (while using soap). If the water jet is turned on, it will consume up to 6L of water per minute or 35.000 L water/ family/ year. This means that a single street can fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every year.
  • A complete closure of appliances when they are not in use. A TV uses 45% of the total energy in the stand-by mode.
• For work environment:
  • Electronically sending documents and information to colleagues or clients in order to avoid increased consumption of paper use.
  • Setting a computer on hibernate function when leaving the office for more than 10 minutes. It will consume up to 95% less than a functional computer.

"Coface aims to be actively involved in the Romanian society issues, trying to make contributions by stimulating employees to behave responsibly through their actions and examples. The environment is not the only direction of Coface’s CSR policy, regarding that we are actively involved in educational projects through leadership, as well as in helping disadvantaged or sick children. At Group level, Coface devotes one day in the first week of December to its CSR program, entitled Coface Trade Aid.", declares Constantin Coman, Country Manager, Coface Romania.