Environmental certificates and Green products
ISO 14001
Casalgrande Padana has been one of the industry’s first companies to become deeply aware of environmental issues, trying to protect the natural environment, health and safety, while retaining and improving the competitiveness of its business. Such efforts have been translated into strategies and actions that put the Company in the cutting edge of research, developing new technology, raw materials and processes that reduce the impact of the manufacturing processes on the environment and on humans. This specific focus on sustainability, which is in Casalgrande Padana’s DNA, has grown even stronger in the last decade. The company has built a specific project on a full range of complementary regulations and requirements about sources of environmental impact and impact-prevention or impact-minimising systems: the milestones in such journey are the ISO 14001 certificate and the EMAS regulations.
EMAS certification
Used to monitor and improve the Company’s environmental performance, EMAS regulations are above all a voluntary tool of great value and social impact. To implement it, Casalgrande Padana set up an environmental management system within its site, which, based on a thorough analysis of its own environmental impacts and an objective assessment of their extent, establishes an improvement plan, with relevant targets and indicators to measure the success of such plan. With its environmental statement, Casalgrande Padana makes a specific pledge to its stakeholders. The credibility of the entire mechanism is substantiated by an accredited third-party auditor.
LEED certification
The LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) was developed and launched in the United States in 1999 by the US Green Building Council, the organisation that brings together the US building, research and governmental stakeholders to provide the building industry with a useful sustainability-certification system.
Such certification assesses and certifies the environmental, social and economic sustainability of a building, from design to everyday management, through a flexible system in which different formulas apply to different types of buildings: LEED New Construction (NC), Existing Buildings (EB), Commercial Interiors (CI), Core & Shell (CS), Homes, Neighbourhood Development.
In particular, the LEED-NC applies to new constructions and major refurbishments.
LEED is a voluntary certification that has just recently made its debut on the global scene and is now an accredited sustainability-certification system for the building industry.
In the certification procedure, buildings are rated depending on who well they comply with a number of LEED prerequisites and credits, in 6 areas:
1. Sustainable site
2. Efficient water management
3. Energy consumption and impact on the atmosphere
4. Materials and resources
5. Interior environmental standards
6. Innovation in design.
To meet LEED credits in the proportion of recycled materials, Casalgrande Padana applied for and received from the CERTIQUALITY Quality Certification Board the “technical product-certification document for building products with a proportion of recycled material: ceramic tiles or semi-finished products to be used in the manufacturing process”.
For their distinctive properties (antibacterial), all of Casalgrande Padana’s Bios products are eligible for the LEED credit ID 1.1-1.4 “innovation in design”.
