DEBATIN’s voluntary sustainability report

This year – as Anton Debatin GmbH enters its 101st year – we’re proud to publish our second sustainability report. As you can imagine, this isn’t a task to tackle in a spare five minutes. Which is why we’d like to thank each and every member of our DEBATEAM for the time and effort they’ve poured into working on this sustainability report. It’s based on the standards of the German Sustainability Code, a framework that empowers us because it shows us exactly where we stand in our efforts to become more sustainable. In turn, this really helps us see what needs doing and identify opportunities for doing business even more sustainably.

Ultimately, of course, everything comes down to the people who work in our company. Our sustainability course seeps from top management down to ground level – but it works in the reverse direction, too. Because that’s the only way sustainable development works in a company. You have to walk the talk, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. Otherwise it would be all style and no substance, and there’s a word for that: greenwashing.

Naturally, we’re still far from perfect. However, sustainability is an ongoing journey to which we’re committed. We want to continue learning, making progress and ensuring CRSD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) is a grassroots revolution. For our own sakes, and for the sake of our planet.

We hope you enjoy reading our sustainability report 2.0 and would be immensely grateful for any feedback you feel able to provide!

This time round, we’re not expecting to get “points for trying” for our sustainability report – it will be judged fair and square. And that’s fine with us: our commitment to doing business sustainably has long since passed from the airy-fairy stage to a resolute mindset that’s firmly anchored in our corporate strategy. This is the story of an amazing ride.

Sustainability was no stranger to us in 2020. Writing our first sustainability report, on the other hand, was a new experience. Here you can read how it all began and how we started doing lots of things right, long before we ever wrote our first report.