KÖVET, The Hungarian Association of Environmentally Aware Management

Focus on a Partner - November 2008

In this interview, Csaba Bodroghelyi, Managing Director of KÖVET, The Hungarian Association of Environmentally Aware Management, discusses CSR in Hungary and introduces KÖVET's new project TRAIN4CSR as well as their Environment Saving Award Scheme and other activities of the organisation.

What are, in your view, key CSR topics on the agenda for Hungarian companies?

Csaba Bodroghelyi

CSR in Hungary is a relatively new phenomenon. We see room for accelerating CSR practices among Hungarian companies, although Hungary is leader in CSR in Central and Eastern Europe.

The first movement of CSR in Hungary was mainly connected to donations and philanthropy. Today it's no question anymore that CSR is much more than promoting social issues.

The key issue for Hungarian companies is to understand that CSR is not equivalent to merely establishing environmental and social programmes and management systems. CSR is a strategic approach on how companies can do their business responsibly. It should appear in every decision, action, programme. This is the idea we try to promote by presenting good practices.

KÖVET, in partnership with several national partners, including CSR Europe, has just been granted EU funding for a project titled TRAIN4CSR. Could you tell us more about this project?

The TRAIN4CSR project is financed by the EU Leonardo da Vinci programme and its main objective is to develop CSR training material with a new approach in terms of training methodology. As a result of the two-year-long project, an adaptable, state of the art CSR training will be created in four languages (English, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish). Training modules will be available on 8-10 topics, based on an extensive needs analysis.

The project will be coordinated by KÖVET. Project partners are CSR Europe's national partner organisations Forética, Impronta Etica, Scottish Business in the Community, and CSR Europe. We hope that at the end of the project we manage to create entirely new and innovative content and methodology in order to improve the quality of training systems serving the education of employees in CSR in European companies.

What other projects is KÖVET currently implementing and what is the added value for your corporate members in regards to such projects?

Our projects can be divided into two groups.

Firstly, projects focused on SMEs. Currently we have two of them. The BeSmarter programme aims to help SMEs implement an environmental management system called EMAS Easy, which is based on EMAS with a simplified method (cost and human resources effective).

The other SME project is called Alternative Entrepreneurs which objective is to accelerate CSR best practices among SMEs. We collect case studies from small businesses where profit is an important instrument, but not the final objective; whom we think are the closest to economic actors working in harmony with the ideal of sustainable development.

For multinationals and big businesses, we have different services such as sustainability report verifications, trainings, workshops for experience sharing and R&D projects - as an example life cycle assessment, environmental communication, and sustainability performance evaluation.

Every year, KÖVET organizes an Annual Conference with Environmental Saving Awards. What is the aim of such an awards scheme?

The Environmental Saving Award is awarded to those companies which submit the best proposals fr 'the 'Money Back through the Window' programme which is one of KÖVET's most popular and successful projects. The idea is to collect case studies from companies to prove that money spent on environmental protection is not "money thrown out the window", but rather a good investment that pays back in a short period, and gives economical advantages to environmentally aware companies.

Since 2002 case studies have been gathered annually. Over the last six years, we have collected 262 case studies from 56 different businesses with a total saving of 58.8 million euro. Every year, we have published a case study book, and in 2007 we created an online database available in Hungarian and English.

The Environmental Saving Award has been handed to the companies with the best case examples every year by the Hungarian Environmental Minister since 2003. The winners this year were AUDI Hungaria, Axellia, G&G and Holcim Hungary.

The latest awards ceremony was held at the XIII. KÖVET Annual Conference in October. In addition to the awards, the "Innovation in Environment Protection" conference focused on Energy and the question of the increased comfort that we reach by growing energy consumption: do we really need so much mobilizable energy?

KÖVET also organises company site visits for business people and students. Could you describe what this experience is all about?

The so called company site visits are among KÖVET's most popular activities. These visits are organised to exchange experiences and best practices on sustainability topics.

During the last three years approximately 400 visitors - businesspeople, NGOs and academia - have participated. This year the last visit is taking place in December at AUDI Hungaria. In 2009 KÖVET plans to visit new interesting member companies, for example Coca-Cola HBC Hungary Ltd., one site of MOL-Group, OTP Bank Ltd.

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