Behind the scenes of sustainability: a shared journey built on values and people

Marco Blumer, CEO of Isoil Impianti S.p.A.

 

Why we’re sharing our sustainability journey now

At ISOIL, we’ve always preferred doing things to talking about them. We see what happens inside the company as something that belongs to us, and it matters first of all to the people who work here. This is the first time we’ve chosen to speak publicly about sustainability.

 

Why now? We had been talking about ISO 14001 certification for a long time, and for just as long we kept putting it off. For us, the point was never the certificate itself. It was about taking the issue seriously and making our own contribution. The work we did along the way made us more aware of how much each of us can do for the environment. That’s why we decided to talk about it.

 

 

Sustainability as part of ISOIL’s culture

“Here, cutting waste was a reality long before anyone called it sustainability.”

 

At ISOIL, sustainability starts with simple habits: watching how much water and electricity we use, separating our waste for recycling, and taking care not to waste anything. These habits were in place long before the certification, and for us they were simply how we worked. Today we track them on a regular basis. Water consumption, for example, is always monitored as part of our environmental management system.

 

These habits weren’t imposed from the top. More than once, after talking things through with our team, we decided together to move in this direction, and that’s also where the decision to get certified came from. It was a shared push.

 

The story of the water we use to calibrate our reference measures shows this well.

 

For years, we used tap water and disposed of it as soon as each test was over. A few years ago, we realized we were wasting it. Our first idea was the simplest one: save it to water the flower beds we look after on our grounds. To be sure, we had it chemically tested, and the results stopped us. The water wasn’t suitable. So we looked for another way. We put two disused tanks back into service, and since then the same water has been reused several times before it’s disposed of.

 

 

What this means for ISOIL’s customers and partners

For us, sustainability is a broader idea than “the environment.” It’s also about how we show up in the community where we operate. For several years now, we’ve chosen to support education and culture.

 

For many years, we sponsored our town’s cycling team, with financial support and a direct relationship with its management. For years, we’ve supported the BergamoScienza festival, both financially and by encouraging our team to attend its talks. For the past few years, we’ve supported the Museo delle Storie di Bergamo: we covered the setup costs of an exhibition on the city’s Walls and encouraged many of our team members to visit. Our support will continue in other forms.

 

The same choice shows inside the company too. At Christmas, following a tradition that goes back many years, we give our team and our customers a book, a novel, as a way to bring culture further into our lives. Anyone who works with us already knows this side of ISOIL, because they see it every year. Until now, we’ve only shared it directly with our customers and suppliers. Now we’re making it public.

 

 

The three pillars of our journey: certification, people, technology

Over the coming months, we’ll share our journey through three themes.

 

• Certification. We have earned UNI EN ISO 14001 certification. It’s a major milestone, but the most interesting part will be the work it takes to maintain it, which will let us dig deeper. We’re at the beginning, and we still need to collect a lot of data before we can set realistic targets.
• People. This is about everyday life at the company: bins for sorting different types of waste, hybrid cars chosen for at least the past couple of years to reduce CO₂ emissions, remote work and flexible organization, and team-building activities with an eye to their social impact.
• Technology. Fuel measurement is what we do. In recent years, we’ve been testing more and more whether we can also measure “green” fuels such as biodiesel, alcohol, methanol, and e-fuels (synthetic fuels), so our customers can use these energy sources too.

 

 

Follow along with us

The story doesn’t end here. Over the coming months, we’ll keep sharing our journey with you, here and on LinkedIn, in the way we always have: quietly, because discretion is part of who we are. We do what we do because we believe in it, regardless of how much attention it gets outside the company. This time, we’re glad to share it with you. We hope you’ll follow along.