Environmental Policy

VakıfBank aims a sustainable and innovative progress in every environmental field and also aims to decrease its impacts to minimum level by identifying the environmental dimension of the Bank’s activities and operations in the light of ‘Sustainable development may only be possible with a sustainable environment’ principle.

In accordance with the experience and reputation since its establishment, VakıfBank aims to improve its environmental performance steadily in order to protect the environment and to sustain natural resources. The Bank declares the commitments below in order to balance the economic growth and environmental factors and to put Environmental Policy into practice which is developed within the scope of sustainability practices:

• Complying with all national and international regulations and legislations,
• Going beyond the regulations by taking necessary actions with a consciousness that world resources are not endless and internalizing that as a responsibility of leaving a carefully preserved environment to the future, not as an obligation,
• Identifying stakeholder groups who can affect or can be significantly affected by our activities and taking into account their considerations that are identified at stakeholder engagement process when planning our actions,
• Retrenching consumption of sources such as electricity, water, paper and gas used in branches, Head Office departments and providing necessary technological and systemic infrastructure,
• To carry out studies within the framework of the following objectives on which the Bank’s Board of Director has decided and make the relevant departments take action

  * %2 reduction in annual electricity consumption per square meter

  * %2 reduction in annual natural gas consumption per square meter

  * %2 reduction in annual water consumption per capita

  * %2 annual saving in paper use per capita

  * %2 mitigation in Bank’s total carbon and greenhouse gas emissions

• Promoting recycling and forming a recycling action plan, for packaging wastes such as paper and plastics,
• Supporting the policies and national development plans that will be developed to decrease gas emissions of vehicles used for business trips in order to provide value added for low carbon economy which is a keystone of sustainable development,
• Arranging informative studies for investors to incent the environment friendly processes with the aim of keeping indirect environmental impacts under control during the borrowing from international financial institutions for the purpose of investments on energy efficiency and renewable energy, following up all the steps throughout the investment accompanied with an expert staff,
• Creating a corporate culture which is sensitive to the environment with the cooperation of all employees, customers and shareholders by regular trainings and allocating resources regarding sustainable environment in order to raise environmental awareness and internalize the environmental policy within VakıfBank,
• Calculating carbon footprint and taking actions to decrease. Submitting the relevant information to Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP),
• Disclosing the sustainability report pursuant to the standards of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) as a bank which considers sustainability as a basis of the life existence in the world,
• Monitoring the Environmental Policy of VakıfBank which is overseen by Corporate Governance Committee and which aims to support sustainable development and adopts to move the global environmental sensitivity to the highest level as primary duty in order to control and supervise regularly and systematically considering changing dynamics,
• VakıfBank is a member of ICC Turkey and also a part of Sustainable Energy Finance Facility (SEFF), sustainable energy initiative of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).