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In taking part in the EcoVadis audit, KHS has had its commitment to sustainability, especially within its global value chains, verified since 2012. Increasingly strict requirements – necessitated in Europe in particular by the regulations of the European Green Deal[1] – have caused the rating agency to make fundamental changes to its principle of assessment. This has resulted in renewed intensification of all of the rating criteria. The benchmarks in the assessed categories of environment, labor law and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement have been significantly raised. This has led to greater competition between the participating companies and made the procedure even more demanding with regard to the results achieved to date and their associated rankings. Moreover, annual updates of EcoVadis’ evaluation criteria mean that requirements governing proof of performance during an audit have also been tightened. In short, companies thus need to constantly strive to improve their commitment to sustainability.

“Strong signal for the KHS Group”

In this context, KHS GmbH CEO Kai Acker considers the company’s renewed gold status to be a particularly great success. “This is a strong signal for the KHS Group and our customers and provides further confirmation of our commitment to the protection of the environment, ethical business practices and social responsibility.” Besides the names of the medal winners, the assessment period and percentile[2] are now also published. Of all companies evaluated – regardless of their branch of industry – KHS is therefore among the top 5% with its commitment to sustainability. The engineering company is thus consistently pursuing its aim to reach net zero within the Group by 2050. “With our second gold award, we’re creating a reliable and credible basis for assessment of our commitment to sustainability for our customers especially,” explains Acker.

Internationally recognized sustainability certificates

EcoVadis is one of the world’s key platforms for the assessment of corporate sustainability achievements. It aims to provide interested parties from various sectors and markets with a reliable summary of the quality of management systems and the associated risk management setup of companies in the supply chain. The EcoVadis database currently contains more than 130,000 rated companies from over 180 countries and 220 different sectors.

[1] The European Green Deal is a political project instigated by the European Commission that was approved in 2019. The action package is aimed at making Europe climate neutral by 2050.

[2] A percentile compares a company’s performance with all of the rated companies in the EcoVadis database over the previous twelve months. The percentile rank is calculated across all companies in all industries, not per industry.