Please use this form to submit your evaluation for Certification
Background of organisation, values and goals: Extent to which a brief overview of the background of the organisation, the core values, how these relate to ESG & why the organisation aims to be involved in ESG are provided.
Provide a brief overview of the background of your organisation, and how and why your organisation aims to be involved in ESG.
RePlaste is a sustainable material design studio - Creating Sapor™️ aka Marble of the Future. We see our Sapor™️, a 100% recycled & 100% recyclable plastic composite, sheets as a circular alternative to wood, ceramics, marble and mdf.
Summary of project: Extent to which a clear summary is provided on the project outlining the objectives, impacts & results as well as the benefits this has had to the organisation & particular team involved in the project.
Provide a clear summary of your project outlining the objectives as well as the benefits this has had to your organisation and particular team involved in the project.
The B Corp Impact assessment and consequently the B Corp Certification has greatly influenced the gradual changes and processes that we have been integrating at RePlaste. It has allowed us to critique our social and environmental impact in-depth using up to date criteria that is followed by some of the leading companies globally. By doing so, it has allowed us to identify areas for improvement in addition to enacting policies and practices and enhancing both customer and employee retention & experience.
Objectives: Extent to which a clear breakdown of the targets that were set to achieve throughout the project, including reference to the impact this has had on the organisation and external party are provided.
Provide a clear breakdown of the targets you set to achieve through your project, including reference to the impact you expected on your organisation and any external party.
"Fill out relevant sections for: Governance Workers Community Environment Customers Disclosure Questionnaire"
Impacts & results: Extent to which details are provided on how the project has benefitted the sustainability realm as well as the organisation, team & the stakeholders
What reporting format are you using?
BCorp
How does this project fit within your overall sustainability goals and ambitions?*
Sustainability, in today's greenwashed corporate climate, is becoming ever so important to separate companies doing impactful work in the arena. B Corp has emphasized the sustainability aspect of our business and has helped us reevaluate our value proposition to people, planet and the environment.
Provide details on how your project has benefitted the sustainability realm as well as your organisation, your team & your stakeholders if relevant.
"'B Corp Certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials.' By using the standards set forth and followed by some of the leading sustainable brands, it has given us direction as well as criteria to work towards in achieving a sustainable future. It assisted us in redesigning and incorporating governance standards in addition to helping structure how different aspects of RePlaste (from customers and workers to environment and community) can have an increasingly positive impact. This has allowed us to increase our sales while staying true to our triple bottom lined approach. While some best practices were followed, we integrated them into company governing documents to allow for more transparency."
Supporting evidence: Extent to which details are provided for supporting documents and a clear summary of metrics relating to impacts & results, base case metrics that are relevant to the project.
When did you first achieve certification?
6/15/2023
Did you partner with a third party to implement this project?
Yes
Which solution provider/ company did you work with to achieve this?
Living Business
Team engagement: Extent to which a clear overview is provided on how the team & stakeholders collaborated to drive & implement your project or initiative. Details on number of staff involved in project.
Provide a brief overview of how your team & stakeholders collaborated to drive & implement your project or initiative. Please include details of number of staff involved.
Nigar Salmanova (Living Business) was an integral part in helping us realize the importance of the certification as well as the potential benefits both internally and for external stakeholders. Needless to say, going through the plethora of questions, allowed us to analyze our existing policies and practices while allowing us to improve upon them using criteria in line with internationally accepted standards.
Future implications & brief strategy: Extent to which a clear overview is provided on how the participant will move forward with the specific project, and its longand short-term implications if known.
Provide a brief overview of how you will move forward with this specific project, its future (short-term & long-term) implications if known. Please include metrics where appropriate.
While the B Corp Active Assessment is the first step, we plan on following up with the relevant changes in our policies to ensure we get the certification. We aim to get the LEED Certified Building Materials in addition to ISO 14001 certifications. This will allow for transparency within our organizational and supply chain activities - this will help us project our sustainability credentials to the wider customer base in a way that helps us avoid greenwashing. Long-term, the B Corp assessment will allow us to tap into markets and projects that prefer vendors with the right certifications.
Spinneys Egypt is an established grocery retailer with a store network of 22 stores across different cities in Egypt and a growing E-commerce channel. One of our strategic goals is to achieve best in class ESG to fulfill our responsibility towards our environment, our stakeholders and our community.
Our project is to obtain ISO 22000|2018 certification for our all 22 stores. The benefits are numerous: customer perception & brand equity, prevention of food borne illnesses, cost reduction of reducing contaminated food products, contribute to SDG#8: Decent work and economic growth as the ISO standards requires training employees on HACCP, having a well-trained workforce aware of food hygiene hazards will spill over positively on the community and on their families, amends to our garbage disposal and pest control measures will have a positive impact on the environment.
"1. Gap analysis report that covers a detailed evaluation of the current Management System against the requirements of Integrated System and an action plan 2. 100% of Fresh Food colleagues will be trained on food safety and HACCP standards 3. System designed, developed, and documented across all stores (policies, in-store folders & checklists, posters, workflow, HACCP plan) 4. ISO certification for all stores 5. Surveillance & renewal audit results post certification"
ISO 22000
It fits perfectly with: our governance goals as it helps us satisfy all the requirements of the National Food Safety Authority; our community goals: as our workforce develop their skills and raise awareness in their families. Our environment as we review our pest control & garbage disposal mechanism.
Our teams are now fully aware of HACCP plans and Food Safety training adding to their skills which reflects on Sustainable Development Goal #8 "Decent work and economic growth." In addition, each year one in ten people will suffer from food borne illness or injury and there is a real cost to human life of being exposed to unsafe food; thus food diseases prevention is one of the main goals being served by our project. All store teams are trained on basics of food safety starting from handwashing. Our quality are being trained as internal auditors to be able to identify gaps from the eye of a certification auditor and close them immediately. We conduct swab tests to identify bacteria/viruses early on. Moreover, our pest control and garbage disposal mechanisms are being reviewed to match ISO standards and hence better serve our environment.
12/1/2022
FDI and SGS
We trained 500-600 colleagues. We created a team in charge of ISO preparation to support the Quality & Development team. We hired a consultant to help us build our food safety management system FSMS and held routine meetings with each relevant department.
Our long-term goal after successfully obtaining ISO 22000|2018 for each of our stores is to collaborate with our Fresh Food suppliers on Food Traceability. Our ambition is to be able to identify for every piece of fruit which farm it came from. Our current role in the value chain as retailers makes that difficult to work on directly and thus it will have to be a collaboration with our suppliers as middlemen between us and the farmers/producers. The food traceability concept is still new in Egypt. We wish to be one of the lead contributors in making Egypt's fresh food safer and traceable.
kiklos architects is a Boutique Architectural and Interior Design Studio, where our clients have their daily lives touched by the solutions our designs enable. We are committed to the sustainable economic development of our business, our community and, the world we will leave for our children.
"kiklos architects has applied for and achieved the following certifications throughout 2022: ISO 9001:2015 - Quality Management System ISO 14001:2015 - Environmental Management System RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Chartered Practice - In order to be certified as a ""RIBA Chartered Practice"", an architectural design office is required to establish and comply with several requirements with regards to policies, practices, professional insurance, etc. Moreover, we have also submitted our Impact Assessment towards a B-Corp Certification, with a total score of 89.6 in our BIA."
By applying for and achieving the certifications mentioned above, we aimed at setting a high standard of business ethics, quality of operations, environmental management, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and CSR, on top of specific certifications related to our field of expertise following industry-standard frameworks and practices.
ISO 14001
The certifications above have laid the fundamental frameworks for our compliance with a broader spectrum of ESG markers and KPIs. From day one, we envisaged kiklos architects to flourish into a sustainable business, being able to “do well whilst also doing good” to our people and community.
"When preparing for the certifications mentioned above, we aligned several of our practices and beliefs into standardized frameworks. This process has allowed us to turn theory into practice and to be able to grow our business and operation already into the streamlined frameworks, applying industry best practices and established processes, including our stakeholder engagement strategy and principles."
7/6/2022
Sterling International Consultancy
"Whilst led by Leonardo Herman, our Managing Director, all the certifications mentioned were a joint effort of the entire kiklos team, contributing within their fields of expertise for these achievements. Notwithstanding, Grammatiki Zamani, our Principal Architect and a RIBA Chartered Professional, is the accountable professional on behalf of kiklos for all the matters related to RIBA and our compliance with its code of practice."
"The nearest future milestone we are looking for is the B Corp certification, which is an achievement that would place us as the first architectural design studio in the UAE to be “B Corp Certified”. Moreover, the ISO 9001 and 14001 are programs that require recertification every 3 years and are under continuous improvement and review. Lastly, our “RIBA Chartered Practice” requires yearly review and renewal, which, once again, falls into our strategy of continuous maintenance, development and improvement of our practice in general."
Al Tamimi & Company - UAE based Law Firm, has 17 offices in 10 countries. We have traditionally supported environmental action in an advisory capacity. We are slowly expanding our environmental, social and governance profile and taking the steps, internally & externally, to reduce our footprint.
Al Tamimi & Company prides itself in always taking the lead in global initiatives. That’s why we decided to gear towards a more sustainable approach in all of our offices and join the Living Business programme. The first step in being more sustainable was obtaining the ISO 14001 Certification for our head office in Dubai. We are currently working on getting two more offices – in Abu Dhabi and Qatar – ISO certified by the end of the year. Our ISO 14001 Project Team ensure we are achieving our objective, they work collaboratively on the various pre-requisites for obtaining the certification.
Obtaining the ISO 14001 Certification and joining the Living Business Programme are the the first steps toward achieving our overall objective; to make a positive impact on the environment. At a basic level, we noticed we had a waste problem, we were using around 500 reams of paper monthly in our head office alone. Slowly, we’ve started reducing our paper use and printing to come down from 500 reams to about 50 reams per month. Being ISO certified and joining the Living Business programme is helping the firm to further improve sustainability across its organisation and achieve it goals.
Joining the Living Business programme helped the firm to improve sustainability across the organisation. A recycling initiative with Living Business is expected to divert 1646 kgs of waste from landfill, representing a 50% decrease in total waste as a result of the project throughout 2022.
The firm has introduced a number of initiatives that are now part of our daily working way. From secure printing methods to green office spaces to shared printers, occupancy light sensor installation in meeting rooms, and e-billing, we also implemented several eco-friendly strategies to reduce its carbon footprint year over year. This is having an impact on our footprint internally and in the sustainability realm. We are slowly expanding our environmental, social and governance profile and are, taking the steps, internally and externally, to reduce our footprint. Our Dubai office is in an ISO-certified building in DIFC that implements numerous sustainability measures. We also encourage our clients and employees to take a greener approach, even on a personal level, towards their day-to-day activities inside and outside Al Tamimi & Company.
6/14/2022
Globally
Al Tamimi & Company has a Project Team that work collaboratively on the various pre-requisites for obtaining the certifications and ensuring the firm works towards its sustainability objectives. The team started has successfully introduced secured ISO certification, joined Living Business and rolled out a number of initiatives that contribute to the firm being a better global corporate citizen.
The firm has transitioned to a more digital approach to doing business, in line with a global trend towards digitalisation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Among these changes is taking a digital approach towards old-fashioned legal documentation methods. We are slowly expanding our environmental, social and governance profile and are, taking the steps, internally and externally, to reduce our footprint. Our Dubai office is in an ISO-certified building in DIFC that implements numerous sustainability measures and we encourage our clients and employees to take a greener approach.
CYLKA is an award-winning boutique consulting firm based in Dubai, specializing in innovative CSR and communication. We are committed to serve our clients with practical solutions of Innovation, Government Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
"Our project is to pursue the B-CORP certification to enhance our business model where the ESG becomes a commitment and not an option. We understand that the application process and the approval cycle would takes a long time, however, applying for the initial assessment and discussing the finings internally as a team has added lots of valuable insights. Our involvement as a team with Living Business is adding a value in terms of choosing the right cause/impact, increased knowledge sharing and transfer. As well as raised our awareness on international standards."
"• We are already involved in CSR activities where we offer our time and services in a pro-bono basis but never measured that. Hence, we were keen to manage and measure the impact of every action we do. • We are committed to measure our ESG and CSR performance against a trusted international framework, hence BCORP was a great benchmarking option to see value we provide for the stakeholders including and not limited to the community, workers, customers and to the environment. • We are aiming to create more sustainable value whether that is on investments or business opportunities ."
We strongly believe that the adoption of the BCORP certification is one of the valuable steps towards being a responsible business. It will help us measure and identify new horizons and opportunities for our CSR programs & internal business practice.
"sustainability realm- It helped to build an inspiring business model for the service-based boutique agencies in the MENA region. organization- it helped in shaping more organized and systematic operations, that brings greater trust in the company and a better business experience. team- delivers a higher standard of work, increase productivity and employee’s self-actualization at the same time. stakeholders- We are noticing a better retention rates and stronger relationships with our stakeholders over the time as they have experienced an enhanced engagement. Our stakeholders list covers local clients, regional partners and international NGOs, such as UAE CSR Fund, Kuwait Business Council in Dubai and Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK (CIPR)."
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No
We have collaborated with Living Business team in putting together the requirements for the Bcorp application. The two founding members of CYLKA were highly involved on the project in a addition to the Operations Manager. The collaboration process started from identifying the project, to applying for the Bcorp assessment as well as developing necessary documents and manuals.
We are keen to inspire more businesses from the MENA region to be part of sustainable movements like Living Business and the Bcorp. Through our journey, we found out that the Bcorp certification covers a wide range of sustainable practices and we are considering to expand our impact especially on the governance side.
