Sustainability at E-T-A

As a value-based family business, we contribute to this goal through fair pay - also in threshold countries. For employees in need, we have established a support fund to be able to help quickly and unbureaucratically.

We protect our employees and their families from hunger by providing safe jobs and a fair pay. We also offer healthy and sustainable food in our staff restaurant.

As a company, the health of our employees is very important to us. We have set up our own “Health Centers” in threshold countries, we organise moving breaks and offer financial subsidies for fitness centres. Our employees are provided with appropriate protective equipment and preventive medical checkups.

Our vision is the personal development of all our employees. We promote this with substantial training budgets, our E-T-A Kolleg and regular progress dialogues. Agile work allows continuous learning and the ability to adapt. We are in close contact with universities and offer apprenticeships and internships. In the Nuremberg metropolitan region, we support management personal through the Cross Mentoring Programme.

E-T-A supports the project "Women in Leadership Positions" by the bayme vbm (Employers' Association of the Metal and Electrical Industry in Bavaria), which has been promoting the careers of women for over a decade. We have been able to increase the proportion of women in our own leadership positions from 0 % to 33 % over the last decade and are pursuing the goal of achieving parity. 

We provide treated and filtered drinking water free of charge for our employees at all locations and we use water resources sustainably. In the threshold countries, we provide high-level sanitation facilities. Our plating department discharges clean water and we successfully distribute electronic overcurrent protection devices for the water-recycling sector.

At our locations in Altdorf and Hohenfels, we are exclusively supplied with green energy and we have our suppliers confirm this. We are already covering 25 % of our power demand through our own photovoltaic systems. The new logistics building generates more power than it requires through photovoltaic systems. We also install photovoltaic systems at our locations abroad. Moreover, different circuit breaker types are used in applications for renewable energies, making them safer and more reliable.

It is our goal to ensure sustainable growth, living wages and the implementation of the principles of the UN Global Compact. We have established a “Social performance culture” at E-T-A. In our employee surveys, carried out by the Great Place to Work, our employees regularly reflect high satisfaction with their workplace. In this regard, E-T-A is among the top 100 companies in Germany.

Our products protect lives and assets against damages caused by overcurrent. The scope ranges from industrial applications to incubators for newborns or the electrical protection of production facilities for Corona vaccines. With a F&E budget of about 8 % of our turnover, we achieve sustainable innovations, collaborate with universities and are a member of public funding and research projects. Our high standards are reflected through different awards, such as the “Top 100 innovative companies” or E-T-A’s repeated No. 1 listing as world market leader champion in the “Circuit breaker for equipment protection & circuit protectors” area.

Regardless of the cultural and regional differences, we shape the values and orientations of the company at all locations through our vision and strategy. By means of a so-called Company Retreat, we promote cultural work at E-T-A with globally networking participants and ensure a common understanding of our values and orientation through our leadership principles. Our plants specialise in the sense of a Centre of Excellence and work based on their respective strengths. By joining the BME Code of Conduct, we also follow the principles of the UN Global Compact to eliminate discrimination of any kind.

We support our local communities through the release of employees in the context of voluntary activities such as e.g. the fire brigade, the Red Cross or the Federal Agency for Technical Relief. Our fund raising committee decides on the use of the donation budget for local funding every year. Our electrical charging stations are available to the public to promote electric mobility beyond the E-T-A environment. In the site planning, we pursue an extensive greening of the areas and the preservation of natural flower meadows.

Since 2014, our environmental management system has been certified according to the ISO 14001 standard, in 2015, our energy management was certified according to the ISO 50001 standard. In this context, we have gradually reduced the number of hazardous substances and removed harmful chemicals from our production processes and products. Scrap and waste are constantly being reduced through continuous optimisation. When constructing and renovating buildings, we pay great attention to the use of sustainable materials and energy efficiency. To promote sustainable consumption habits among our employees, we always offer attractive vegetarian dishes in our staff restaurant and we are cooperating with bike leasing partners.

We have set ourselves the goal of becoming a climate-neutral company. We pursue this goal primarily through real process and behavioural changes and not only based on climate certificates. For example, we rely entirely on electric mobility for our vehicle fleet and provide charging stations for the vehicles in our parking areas. We use environmentally and climate-friendly technology such as LED lighting and replace fossil fuels for heating where possible.

We use packaging made of sustainable materials as far as technically possible and avoid using plastic packing. In the procurement of office supplies, we give preference to sustainable and recycled materials.

We actively pursue environmental protection based on the precautionary principle, promote environmental awareness and rely on the use of environmentally friendly technologies. We actively design attractive locations via greening concepts.

Our mission is the protection of lives and assets. This is the intended purpose of our products and services. This is why we do not want to supply products or solutions for military customer applications, which are intended for combat operations

We support our customers in their efforts to develop their own supply chains towards sustainability. We also work together with our suppliers on the further development and orientation towards sustainability goals. This is reflected, among other things, in contracts as well as in the annual supplier assessments.