What is your vision for achieving sustainability in eye care?
Sustainability goes far beyond eye care and is more an attitude towards the kind of future world we want for us, for our children, and our grandchildren. At Teleon, we have made it one of the three main pillars of our corporate vision and that means not only designing sustainable products and solutions for eye care, but also becoming a sustainable organization as a whole.
What steps has Teleon taken towards achieving sustainability goals?
In 2019, we built one of the most modern IOL manufacturing plants in the world in Spankeren, the Netherlands; it is completely free of fossil fuel use. An intelligent building design and architecture ensures we use as little energy as possible both for our processes and for heating and cooling. I invite you to come and see what we are achieving here!
Have any events affected your sustainability goals?
The current geopolitical events shaking up the world are going to have a drastic influence on how we look at sustainability, and they are already having a huge impact on sourcing and distributing energy, which is the lifeblood of every economy. This also drives us to become completely fossil fuel free and reach carbon net zero even faster.
Which sustainability-focused groups are you working with?
Last January, we became a signatory of The Climate Pledge, a commitment for businesses and organizations to take collective action to tackle the world’s greatest crisis, and to work together to build a safe and healthy planet for future generations. So far, 315 businesses have joined, including Microsoft and Unilever. Companies and organizations that sign The Climate Pledge agree to three areas of action:
- Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis
- Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies
- Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets to achieve net-zero annual carbon emissions by 2040.
I believe that joining the climate pledge underlines our commitment to sustainability across Teleon, and stresses the fact that we have chosen a carbon net zero strategy as one of our central company goals.
