Bringing everyone on board for a sustainable future.

As part of its global sustainability program, Comet is systematically embedding sustainability in its global organization and in its strategy. At the same time, we are promoting a corporate culture in which every Comet employee worldwide can and should make a contribution to greater sustainability.

Many sustainability efforts at Comet have been in place for years. As an integral part of the high-performance organization that we are becoming, however, sustainability must be much more firmly established in the company globally, both at the strategy level through our business model (see purpose), and in our culture.

Sustainability in the global organization

To address the subject in a structured way at a global level, Comet launched a worldwide sustainability program in January 2021 (Sustainability report 2021). “While the first year was primarily about a Group-wide stocktaking to determine our starting point, in the second year we worked more intensively on a common understanding of sustainability and what it should mean for the future Comet organization,” says Ulrich Steiner, Vice President of Investor Relations and Sustainability. “We developed a sustainability policy, clearly defined the respective responsibilities in the organization and agreed on a climate roadmap. Just as importantly, we motivated our employees to make concrete suggestions for sustainability at Comet and get involved.”

100 ideas to tackle climate change

The fact that sustainability is also a personal concern for many Comet employees is demonstrated by the initiative titled “Let’s Gather 100 Ideas to Tackle Climate Change,” which Edouard Perroud, Financial Controller, Group Functions, launched on the internal social network Yammer in May 2022. “I’ve heard a lot of discussions among staff about what we could do or what we should change,” says Edouard Perroud, “but the barrier to implementation is too high for the individual employee. With the ideas we collected globally, together we can make concrete suggestions to Comet’s ESG leaders.” By the end of the year, 75 ideas had been gathered. They range from installing solar panels, reducing parking spaces in favor of green areas, subsidizing public transport tickets for employees, and eco-friendly clothing for production employees, to no longer using coffee capsules at the company.

What Comet wants to promote is a corporate culture that creates even more awareness and background knowledge of what sustainability means. In 2022, to help achieve this, the first Climate Fresk Workshop was held in Flamatt. “Although I had some previous knowledge of the scientific side of climate change, I gained a lot more understanding of it all in the workshop, and the exchange with other Comet employees showed me many places in the company where there is potential to become more sustainable,” says Lukas Forster, Team Leader, Production Engineering, X-Ray Tubes, IXM.

It is not only in Flamatt that the issue of sustainability is being addressed more proactively, but also at our locations worldwide. In April 2022, for example, a training session on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with a certified instructor was held at our site in Japan.

Investing in the future by improving access to education

A major aspiration of Comet’s is to spark enthusiasm for technology in the next generation (See the annual report 2020: Engaged for the next generation). Access to information and education is foundational to this. That is why, since 2020, we have been using Comet’s global year-end campaign to support UNICEF education projects. In 2022, we joined with the many players in our game-based campaign to raise funds for the Giga Initiative by UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that aims to close the digital divide by connecting schools around the world to the Internet.

Local engagement for a better and fairer world

In 2022, Comet employees at our sites around the world again showed a great deal of personal initiative when it came to supporting local sustainability projects.

For example, in March 2022, twenty-one employees of Comet Technologies Malaysia came together to pick up trash on a beach in Penang, Malaysia. Six visiting employees of Comet San Jose from California also took part in the beach cleanup.

Our Yokohama site took a stand for equality in 2022. “Japan, too, has what is known as ’period poverty’,” says Miho Sugisawa Achahrour, Marketing & Communication Specialist, Comet Technologies Japan. “As a 2021 study showed, among Japanese women with low annual incomes (2.5 million yen or less), about 30% of women cannot afford feminine hygiene items once or more a year, and about 20% cannot afford them at all.” Comet Japan therefore teamed up with the Yokohama Gender Equality Promotion Association and the Yokohama City Council of Social Welfare to donate hygiene products for women.

In Silicon Valley in the USA, the high cost of living can become a daily financial challenge, especially for low-income families. The Second Harvest project seeks to ensure that no one in the local community has to choose between paying their bills and affording a healthy meal. In 2022, Comet employees again collected donations for this program.

“We still have a long way to go,” says Ulrich Steiner, “but sustainability is increasingly finding its way into all decisions and processes at Comet, and the great commitment of our employees makes me very confident for the future.”

Expanding horizons and growing together

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