For twelve months now, RTL Deutschland’s print magazine “Geo” has been working hard to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated during its production. Now the magazine has reached a milestone: “Geo” is climate neutral (see BENET report). In this interview, the publishing unit’s Chief Sustainability Officer Teresa Schönheit talks about the long road to climate neutrality.
It was important to us for ‘Geo’ to prevent as many greenhouse gas emissions as possible before they even arise. Only where we cannot manage this do we offset the remaining carbon dioxide emissions through climate-protection projects. The first phase took a lot of time and care. We wanted to understand in detail how exactly we cause what volume of greenhouse gas emissions.
How do you make sure you don’t miss anything?
What exactly has changed?
A lot of things that aren’t visible at first glance. But one thing you can touch, and feel is the new, much lower-CO2 recycled paper we now use. We have made major changes to the product – which so many people love and cherish. And yet most of our readers have accepted or even welcomed this change.
How do employees feel about the idea of producing “Geo” in a climate-neutral way?
And does that work?
What does work well is the intensive exchange: We now receive data that wasn’t even collected until we requested it. This helps us in our calculations and creates visibility for the topic among our partners. In other areas, however, there is still a lack of data – there, we have to work with projections.
What’s next on the agenda?
We will be changing the production site. I hope to be able to report more on this soon.