© Le Studio Photographique
With its new baseline, Crafting the Future, Les Bouchages Delage, a specialist in premium closures for the spirits market, is underlining its CSR strategy. Bruno Cornet, General Manager of the Cognac-based company, tells us more.
You announced your new CSR strategy this week, but Les Bouchages Delage’s commitment to Social and Environmental Responsibility is not new…
Yes, that’s true; this was a way to officially announce our commitment. By adopting this new CSR identity, we wanted to reaffirm our heritage, our vision for the future and our desire to move forward from a foundation built on the cardinal values of responsibility and respect for both social and environmental matters. Our new identity “Crafting the Future”, expresses our desire to rally our clients and partners to the cause of a more responsible future. It also reflects the day-to-day reality of our sector: a profession of “crafting” that hinges on exacting standards of expertise that our collaborators have all come to greatly appreciate. It’s no accident that we received the label Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant (Living Heritage Company), which rewards businesses that embody French excellence.
The company has raised the bar on its objectives, especially when it comes to sustainability. Can you give us more details?
Today 62% of our products incorporate natural materials and we’ve set ourselves the objective of reaching 75% by 2025. Continuous improvement continues to define Les Bouchages Delage, and our policies have long sought to reduce the environmental and social impacts of our products, from sourcing materials to product design, including the production process itself, of course. Note that our sustainable development strategy is widely validated: first with an ISO 22000 certification in 2010; ISO 14001 in 2012 and more recently, in 2019, with a gold medal awarded by rating agency Ecovadis. This last certificate is given to just 4% of companies — those with the best performance in terms of CSR and responsible purchasing.
What are your environmental policies?
We take a resolutely transversal approach, and regularly assess progress through annual audits during our process review. “Crafting the Future" reflects, above all, a 360-degree approach based on the guiding principle of the 5Rs: Reduce, Respect, Rethink, Recycle, and Reuse. From this perspective, eco-design is one of our top challenges, with a focus on the circularity of materials whenever possible. To measure our environmental footprint and identify alternatives at each stage, we have opted for comprehensive product life-cycle analyses regulated by the 14040 standard. These analyses allow us to evaluate the environmental performance of each product throughout its lifecycle, from raw material extraction to end-of-life.
But we’re doing more than just evaluating the products in our catalog: to support our customers and offer them the most appropriate and responsible solutions, we also provide customized analysis for each new development. By collaborating closely with our partners and our suppliers, we have been able to combine industrial development, economic performance, and respect for people and the environment.
