Sustainability as the mission of the Chocolate Museum
The topic of sustainability is becoming increasingly important to us and we are making considerable resources available to achieve greater success in less time. We are guided by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015, which we can and want to help achieve.
To achieve our goals, we rely on three pillars that are within our direct sphere of influence:
1. education for sustainable development
It is now obvious: in a world with seven billion people and limited resources, we cannot avoid learning quickly how sustainable coexistence works. There is no alternative! We must learn that our actions today have an impact on life tomorrow!
As a chocolate museum, we have an average of more than 550,000 visitors from all over the world every year. We are convinced that this is the right place to impart knowledge and values for sustainable development to people. We want to encourage our museum guests to make their contribution to a sustainable world.
This whole complex is summarized under the theme: Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). At the same time, it is also the key to building a sustainable society.
We are therefore investing in education for sustainable development. We are the first museum to be certified as an educational institution for sustainable development by both UNESCO (2019) and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (2018).
2. reduction of our own CO2 footprint
A very important task in order to achieve defined climate targets is to reduce our own CO2 emissions by using new, forward-looking technologies and avoiding wasting the energy used. To this end, the Chocolate Museum has taken and will continue to take numerous measures.
Since 2016, we have been using 100% green electricity to conserve resources. We obtain our district heating from a highly efficient combined heat and power plant. Last but not least, our e-bike as a cargo bike for inner-city deliveries makes a small but significant and highly visible contribution to improving our carbon footprint. The same applies to the renewal of our lighting by completely switching from light bulbs to LED lights.
3. climate friendliness through compensation measures
In 2018, we at the Chocolate Museum set ourselves the goal of achieving CO2 neutrality by 2023. We replaced this target with a better one in 2019:
We took action and have been operating the Chocolate Museum not only climate-neutral but climate-positive since 2019.
As it is not yet possible to offset the museum's carbon footprint with technical measures, Gold Standard certificates are purchased every year, thereby removing CO2 certificates from the market.
In addition, the Chocolate Museum, together with its partner Plant for the Planet, will plant a large number of trees each year. This is currently taking place in Constitution on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Through this significant overcompensation, the Chocolate Museum will be permanently climate-conscious, i.e. remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it emits.
These trees represent a considerable overcompensation of our CO2 footprint, so that we are climate-positive and will compensate our carbon footprint in the coming years up to the founding year 1993. We believe this is a pioneering measure.
Even if these topics have been somewhat pushed into the background of reporting due to the current crises, they remain an important component of our corporate development.
We hope you enjoy reading our report and look forward to your feedback.
Yours sincerely
Annette Imhoff and Dr. Christian Unterberg-Imhoff
