Royal Smit & Zoon has published its 2022 ESG Report

Dedicated to its mission, Royal Smit & Zoon has been working for many years already on creating a socially and environmentally sustainable leather value chain. The company has published its ESG Report for 2022, confirming these efforts and highlighting the company’s progress, solutions, and ambitions towards its mission.

Despite 2022 being a year that has been challenging in many ways, we are proud to be able to report progress towards our long term ESG goals, including:

• Maintaining EcoVadis Gold rating
• Achieving ISO certification for all our production and logistics sites
• Expanding portfolio of ZDHC level 3 certified products
• Implementing a multi-year training program on the Employee Code of Conduct
• Demonstrating thought leadership in several education and community involvement initiatives.
• Continuing strong involvement in key industry networks and organizations

Within the remit of our mission and strategy, Royal Smit & Zoon kept innovating and providing sustainable solutions to the industry. Theinterest and adoption of Zeology, a chrome free, heavy metal free, and aldehyde free tanning agent, has been growing further. In addition, new products like lignin-modified re-tanning agents, biopolymers based on sugar beet pectins, and environmental and performance-optimized retanning products were introduced.

CEO Marc Smit: “The Russia-Ukraine war, with its direct impact on raw materials, energy, and inflation, and the continued Covid-19 lockdowns in China significantly impacted our business and our customers. Despite the global turmoil, we kept true to our mission to ‘Create a Socially and Environmentally Sustainable Leather Value Chain’, spanning environmental, social, and governance dimensions. ESG is at the core of our strategy and critical to ensuring continuity for our family-owned business.”

At the same time, the report demonstrates our ambition to continue to drive progress and transformative action across the entire leather value chain. Keeping pace with the constantly evolving ESG landscape, stakeholder expectations, and regulatory requirements while using the ongoing ESG Roadmap targets for 2025 as a basis, Royal Smit & Zoon will update its ESG Strategy and sharpen thetargets in 2023.

This year’s ESG report continues to be 100% online giving quick access to the specific areas of interest.

The online ESG report details can be found here.

Visit our ESG Report