«The eco-design, the environmental question and the life cycle analysis are part of the culture of the Legrand Company.»

- What are the overall missions of the environment pole?

Our department supervises the process of defining and implementing a coherent environmental policy regarding the economical context and the global market of the group. Our team is also in charge of spreading the eco-design policy out, in order to enable protagonists to run operational measure arising therefrom. Methodological tools are developed, especially to help along with the PEP execution by developers within different design and process departments. We also put into action the «reporting» system to measure the environmental progress and place us in relation to the objectives we initially aimed for.

- Your enterprise hoped to get over 67% of products covered by PEP. Could you assert, thus far, that this goal has been reached?

It is fully fulfilled. We have managed to get 2/3 of the worldwide turnover covered by products having environmental information, in the form of PEP. This result is, therefore, more praiseworthy and encouraging for the firm as it has been reached a year early. Such an outcome was not expected until the end of 2018.

- What is this constant progress based on?

This growing coverage corresponds to the company plan which concerns the whole commercialized products all over the world. The eco-design, the environmental information and the life cycle analysis are part of the culture of the Legrand Company. It has been a long time since we thought about a way to measure and communicate on our products environmental impact and to limit it. Developing and spreading out environmental information through PEP was the solution.

- What about the environmental future of Legrand? 100% of the turnover covered by PEP?

Nowadays a firm like Legrand does not support the PEP association only to serve its corporate social responsibility policy (CSR), but because it also confers a real competition advantage. Publishing the environmental information through the PEP Ecopassport® brings more value and credibility than publishing it in one's own name. It is a checked information which respects a certain amount of criteria acknowledged worldwide. Our purpose is not to get a 100% of the turnover covered because it is not relevant for all of our products. Those 2/3 have to be considered as the stage that we will not necessarilly try to go beyond. New products are constantly developed and PEP have a five-year lifetime, so it has to be constantly redo to keep this majority of the turnover covered. Staying at 2/3 is not a stagnation, it is making a substantial and strategic effort to perpetuate the image of the company.