Our society and businesses are built on natural capital

Biodiversity loss impacts all aspects of society, including economic, environmental, and social as well as governance models. Collectively, we all need to take care of the world’s natural assets, and that includes ROCKWOOL.

According to scientists, loss of biodiversity is an even more urgent concern than the climate crisis since we can to some extent mitigate climate change. Biodiversity loss, however, is permanent and cannot be restored. This is also why biodiversity is increasingly being seen as a critical subject that businesses are expected to responsibly manage.

We have the ambition to help reduce biodiversity loss. We do this in several ways, including mitigating risks at own sites; monitoring supplier commitments; sponsoring and engaging in net gain projects; minimising the use of virgin materials, reducing water use and decarbonising our operations; and investigating avoided biodiversity impacts across our product portfolio.

With the EU’s Corporate Social Responsibility Directive (CSRD) and the EU Taxonomy setting out new reporting requirements, standards and minimum safeguards for companies, ROCKWOOL is currently developing a biodiversity approach, and will be publishing its position paper on biodiversity later in 2024. Biodiversity was identified as one of the material topics for ROCKWOOL in a stakeholder consultation and we will be reporting on this topic from 2024.

According to the World Economic Forum, loss of biodiversity is one of the greatest risks to business and society.

What is biodiversity?

Biodiversity refers to the variety of living species that make up our natural world, including plants, animals, bacteria and fungi. These work together in ecosystems that maintain balance and supports life on land, in oceans and other water bodies.

Measuring biodiversity is extremely complex because - unlike carbon – it cannot be boiled down to a single metric such as CO₂ equivalents (CO₂e).

Blooming red poppy flower growing out of dry stone wall. High-quality photo

Two important frameworks are in place to reduce and reverse biodiversity loss from the EU and the UN

The EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy aims to address the main drivers of biodiversity loss with its comprehensive long-term plan. The goal being that by 2050 the world’s ecosystems should be restored, resilient and adequately protected.

The EU Taxonomy is one of the tools to help reach the 2050 goal. Companies must choose one or several environmental goals. If biodiversity is not chosen as the primary goal, a company must still provide documentation that it is not doing harm to this or any of the remaining topics. The proportion of the company’s turnover, CAPEX and OPEX aligned with EU Taxonomy shows to what extent the company’s activities are environmentally sustainable.

The United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in 2022 concluded with a landmark agreement: A plan with concrete measures to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30 percent of the planet and degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030.

This UN Convention will have the same implication for ROCKWOOL as the Paris Agreement, meaning that we will have to set targets and investments for biodiversity.

Enhancing an old landfill site at Cigacice, Poland

Together with a consultant specialising in biodiversity, we identified a decommissioned landfill site close to our factory in Cigacice, Poland as being a favourable location to enhance local biodiversity. We mapped the current state of biodiversity to provide initial recommendations for enhancement activities. These will be further evaluated and explored in 2024 to ensure we support the best plan for the natural habitats on site.

Thumbnail for drone video of Cigacice landfill site

What is ROCKWOOL doing to reduce biodiversity loss?

Mitigation measures at own factories

We are working to ensure that robust mitigation measures are in place at our factories to minimise negative impacts on biodiversity-sensitive areas. For our newer EU-based factories, impacts on biodiversity-sensitive areas are covered by screening or appropriate assessment in the context of the EU Habitats Directive.

Other aspects of biodiversity are covered by a screening or an Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA) done in connection with permitting of the facility. For the older sites, we are reviewing permits specifically to see how biodiversity is covered. If we identify any of our factory locations where biodiversity considerations are not sufficiently covered in the existing permits, prospective mitigation measures will be identified. We have started this review in Europe as most of our production facilities are located here, but will expand to all locations globally.

Mapping our suppliers’ biodiversity commitments

Our biggest category of raw material measured in tons is the stone we use in production. The stone is mined from quarries around the world. We have many suppliers and use several types of stone (e.g., basalt, gabbro, anorthosite and dolomite). In 2024 we will start to map our suppliers to ensure that infringements of existing conservation areas do not occur.

Our Supplier Code of Conduct sets sustainability standards for all our suppliers, including those for stone. All suppliers are required to accept and enforce this Code of Conduct. The Supplier Code of Conduct includes expectations towards suppliers to have an environmental policy, drive continuous improvements, minimize operational footprint and to have a responsible approach to natural resources. For more information about the stone we use, please see our position statement on stone.

Minimising the use of virgin materials, reducing water use intensity and decarbonising our operations

Using more non-virgin materials in our production helps to reduce biodiversity loss as it puts less strain less on the world’s natural capital and less landfilling is needed if we can recycle more materials into our production. Besides taking back used stone wool from the market via the Rockcycle® programme, we are investigating how we can further increase the amount of non-virgin materials and resources we use in production. We are therefore constantly exploring new secondary materials to evaluate their application. Read more on our Circularity page.

Stone wool production uses significant amounts of fresh water to, among others, cool down after the melting process. Our goal is to reduce water use intensity by 20% by 2030 in our factories compared to the 2015 baseline. In 2023, we reached a 16 percent reduction mainly due to implementing different water saving technologies (read more in our Sustainability Report). Biodiversity and water are closely intertwined as “water is an ecosystem service” necessary for upholding a well-functioning ecosystem of forests, soils, rivers, etc.

We are heavily investing in the decarbonisation of our production via electrification and renewable energy. Different from many other businesses, two-thirds of ROCKWOOL’s GHG emissions relate to Scope 1 (own sites) and scope 2 (energy purchase). We aim to reduce these emissions by 38 percent by 2034 compared to baseline 2019 through three main levers: energy efficiency of factories, technology innovation, and circularity. To reach these targets, we have made a commitment to invest up 100 MEUR annually in our factories. There is a clear link between climate change and biodiversity loss, and thus these challenges need to be tackled in parallel. As the world gets warmer, societies experience heatwaves, flooding and other extreme weather events which also drastically affects the natural environment already struggling from habitat loss and over-exploitation of natural resources. Read more about our decarbonisation efforts here.

Avoided biodiversity impacts across our product portfolio

We will investigate the avoided impacts on biodiversity across ROCKWOOL Group. However, what we already know is that Grodan, that specialises in horticulture substrate products used to grow vegetables, fruits and medicinal crops, has an avoided impact. By using the specially engineered stone wool products, professional greenhouse growers can grow their produce avoiding some of the consequences of traditional horticulture that put a strain on biodiversity due to its significant land and other resource use. Professional greenhouse growing, also referred to as Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), plays an important role in protecting biodiversity, as fewer resources are required. In fact, thanks to the stone wool substrates, soilless growing reduces the strains on precious resources, using up to 20 percent less fertilizer, 50 percent less water and 75 percent less land that can be given back to nature to rest and rewild. Read more here.

Biodiversity Net Gain projects

Net gain projects aim to improve natural habitats and must have a measurably positive impact compared to the status before a project was initiated. The core of our biodiversity work will be centred around own operations and our suppliers as this is where the greatest impact can be achieved. Nevertheless, net gain projects bring an extra dimension to our work and allow us to focus on topics that we find especially impactful.

Examples of some of our projects can be found here:

Building a sea horse hotel with the One Ocean Foundation

In the Piccolo Sea in Taranto, Italy, we are supporting the development of seahorse hotel made of stone wool. Despite being home to one of Europe's biggest seahorse colonies, heavy industrial activity in the region has brought with it negative impacts on the seawater and the seahorse population. This is why we, together with the University of Bari, SailGP, and One Ocean Foundation initiated a seahorse repopulation project in 2023. The project consists of creating an artificial living space from stone wool for sea horses. Together with marine biologists, we will observe over the coming two years how the seahorse population is developing and benefiting from the initiative.

Seahorse hotel project in cooperation with SailGP, One Ocean Foundation and the University of Bari

Protecting onsite species and biodiversity

In 2019, at a new logistics centre co-located with our factory in Wales, UK, we put special measures in place for protected species found onsite, such as dormice. As dormice are a nocturnal species, the lighting system had to be carefully designed to mitigate any impact. Lighting specialists designed a system that would provide adequate light for our logistics colleagues to work safely while minimising light pollution that could disturb the dormice. The set up includes a wooden wall that was erected at the northern perimeter of the site to prevent light spill into the woodland. Encouragingly, recent surveys have confirmed that dormice are still resident in the area.

shot of a woodland dormouse on a tree with white flowers, a dormouse with a gray coat, wild nature, a very small squirrel,

In addition, the trees and plants that were removed as part of the site development have been replaced with native species, such as hazel and honeysuckle, which provide sustenance for local wildlife and encourage greater flora diversity across the seasons. We have been doing follow-on monitoring of reptiles post-build and have recently discovered adders (also known as European vipers), meaning there has been an increase in biodiversity on site.

Biodiversity at our headquarters

In Hedehusene, Denmark, we have an outdoor area covering 520 000 m2, which also includes an old factory site. Combined, this is more than 70 football fields, thus the potential for implementing biodiversity measures is significant. We are incorporating biodiversity into our plans for the area, which will include investigating the current status to more fully understand how we can best measure and improve the area’s biodiversity. The ambition is to build on what we have done so far such as changing the mowing pattern to allow for healthier vegetation and letting wilderness grow around the solar panels and other green areas. An added benefit is that we want to create an attractive environment for employees to spend more time outdoors during the work day.