Sustainability has always been integral to GROHE’s brand identity and is one of the company’s key values. As such, it focusses much of its CSR towards supporting crucial environmental issues. Following its achievement of reaching global carbon-neutral production in April 2020, GROHE has since continued to build upon its impressive sustainability credentials with a number of global and local initiatives throughout the year.
GROHE’s key global sustainability activity since April 2020 has been the continuation of its ‘Less Plastic Initiative’, which aims to replace plastic packaging for all its products with more sustainable alternatives. To date, as many as 23.5 million pieces of plastic packaging material have already been saved as part of this initiative – a first milestone on the way to the goal of ultimately banning all plastic materials from product packaging by March 2021. The goal of reducing plastic waste is also strengthened by the brand’s collaboration with Marcella Hansch, the founder of Pacific Garbage Screening e.V. Both partners are united by their vision of clean water through the reduction of plastic waste in oceans and rivers. The trained architect has developed a water platform that collects plastic waste in rivers to prevent it from being washed into the oceans. In addition, GROHE also creates its own sustainable product solutions that help to facilitate the reduction of single-use plastic bottle waste by providing a more eco-friendly alternative like its GROHE Blue Home still and sparkling filtered water tap. GROHE UK also strives to improve public awareness of the global plastic crisis, most recently by commissioning a YouGov survey that highlighted the UK’s changing behaviours around the issue of single-use plastic consumption.
In a year that has been rife with unsettling times and challenges, GROHE has also made a conscious and consistent effort to support initiatives closer to home in 2020. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring, GROHE UK supported Deliveraid, an organisation which provides meals to frontline NHS staff courtesy of local, independent catering businesses. GROHE UK employees who were working from home were encouraged to donate the money that they would normally spend on a coffee or lunch that day to the cause and raised a total of £1000, which was then matched by the company.
Also, to complement its global sustainability strategy with local action, a 14-strong team of socially distanced employees from GROHE UK gathered in Runnymede, Surrey in October 2020 to remove plastic litter from the River Thames and the surrounding towpaths. The event was organised in honour of LIXIL Community Month, an occasion that takes place throughout the month of October each year, where more than 15,000 employees from its brands all over the world take part in activities that see them give back to their community. Among them, the GROHE UK team was able to collect a total of 28 bags of waste.”