Environmental Protection at Eurofins – Employees Get Involved

An All-round Green Week

Apr 2019. During Eurofins‘ Sustainability Week in March, many employees came together for voluntary activities to protect the environment of their immediate surroundings.

Kick-Off with the Sustainability Workshop

On Tuesday, 26 March 2019, the sustainability champions of all Eurofins laboratories for food analysis in Germany met in the Lüneburger Heide to exchange ideas and plan new sustainability projects.

The Eurofins sustainability champions

As a central topic, they discussed the concrete meaning of the term sustainability for Eurofins and which guiding principles they want to develop from it that are particularly important to employees. The participants particularly appreciated the exchange of best practice examples from the laboratories, such as the switch to more environmentally friendly laboratory gloves and the installation of an exchange shelf. This enabled the sustainability champions to receive many new ideas and impulses on the subject of sustainability and take them with them into their laboratory units.

Hamburg Cleans Up

Immediately afterwards, several teams swarmed out at the laboratory campus Hamburg to clear the company premises and the surrounding areas of rubbish as part of the "Hamburg cleans up" campaign. Eurofins has been participating in the campaign, which is organised by Stadtreinigung Hamburg for several years. Once again, the committed employees have collected many well-filled bags of rubbish.

Successful yield of Eurofins colleagues during the Hamburg clears up event

Birdwatching with NABU – Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union

Finally, on Saturday, 30 March 2019, Eurofins employees interested in nature met for the second Eurofins Planting Day, this time with the topic "What is flying there?”. Together with their families, they cultivated the during the autumn campaign planted bee pasture - chopping, weeding and removing compost and bark mulch. After the lunch break, Frederik Schawaller and Thomas Sommer from NABU Hamburg Gruppe Süd gave a lecture on the most common native bird species for the adults. The children used the break for painting and handicrafts or for a midday nap. In the early afternoon they all moved outside again to discover the bird species, they had gotten to know during the previous lecture, live on the company premises. A special highlight was a pair of oystercatchers that flew a beautiful bow in front of the participants. Furthermore, they could watch zilpzalp, blackbird, magpie, crow, mallard, great and blue tit, and the otherwise rather shy dunnock. During the tour, the Nabu experts discovered an amphibian balz ground, and observing the grass and earth frogs at the bridal show was the final attraction for all participants.

Left: Taking care of the bee pasture in front of the Eurofins main entrance at Neuländer Kamp. Right: Thomas Sommer from NABU (far right in the picture) explains nature details to the participants that are easily overlooked in everyday life.

As a momento of the day, all participants received a bag of seed bombs – for the home garden, balcony or also the side strip on the way home.

The review of the Eurofins planting campaign in autumn 2018 and further information on the nature projects of the NABU  can be found under the following links:

• Sustainability in action at the Eurofins laboratory site in Hamburg: Report on the first employee planting campaign in autumn 2018

• Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union NABU