SUSTAINABILITY

Alcantara has always been profoundly committed to sustainability. In fact, for a number of years, the Company has based its approach to development and profitability on the balance between social, economic and environmental factors.

Over time, sustainability has become a true guiding principle, involving the entire corporate structure and creating a real shared culture. It is key to the Company’s mission: making every day extraordinary.

Being Carbon Neutral means, after offsetting, having a net-zero balance of greenhouse gas emissions, from cradle to grave, across all stages from raw material supply to the production process, from product use to end-of-life. With a pioneering approach, Alcantara reached this ambitious goal back in 2009, obtaining the much-coveted Carbon Neutrality certification from one of the strictest and most rigorous international certification bodies (TÜV SÜD). Since then, the Company has fostered a deep and constant commitment to sustainability, as underlined by the processes designed to achieve continuous improvement with the company, and the numerous additional certifications it has obtained.

Every year, Alcantara measures the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the company’s activities and the product, from the beginning of the manufacturing process, including the raw materials, to the end of the product life cycle. It takes action to reduce them, offsetting residual emissions through the acquisition of carbon credits from Certified and Verified Offset Projects. While acknowledging that carbon offsetting is not the final solution, nevertheless we believe that carbon credits are a useful tool to accelerate the fight against climate change beyond our value chain, and to measurably reduce global emissions. Besides, the projects supported by Alcantara every year bring tangible social benefit to the impacted territories.

Alcantara S.p.A. has been monitoring and working alongside its supply chain since 2007, with a view to increasing awareness of sustainability-related issues and enhancing the commitment to resolving these; the Company stipulates that all suppliers and partners must respect the universal principles of human rights, labour standards, environmental protection and fighting corruption. Alcantara S.p.A. is committed to ensuring that its suppliers meet all its procedural requirements for inclusion on the Supplier List. It also encourages improved environmental performance and social responsibility on the part of its suppliers, through: audits carried out on site in order to assess Alcantara S.p.A.’s ability to satisfy the specific supply requests and observe the requirements of the certified management systems (quality, safety, environment and social responsibility); incentives to adopt programmes to improve energy consumption, reduce dangerous materials, reduce emissions, use recycled

or recovered materials and manage waste as well as possible; updated mapping of suppliers, based on various criteria, including the level of risk to sustainability posed by the supply, the geographic area the supplier operates in, information in the public domain, compliance with the Code of Ethics and/or programmes of corporate social responsibility, and conduct during supply;  signing of contracts for services with suppliers that hold them to complying with the SA8000^® standard and observing the general section of the Organisational Model (pursuant to Legislative Decree 231/2001) and Alcantara S.p.A.’s Code of Ethics in carrying out their responsibilities. In 2019, Alcantara S.p.A. continued to pursue initiatives designed to raise awareness throughout the supply chain of its environmental sustainability model, increasing the number of supplier categories involved in calculating and offsetting CO₂ emissions by continuing to implement certified offsetting projects.