Nature and resources conservation

Targets and management approach 00 Environment and 100% green electricity To the Strong Rail strategy

The protection of biodiversity and natural habitats is another important task that we fulfill, in particular in the operation and further development of our infrastructure. We fulfill all legal requirements regarding nature conservation with our activities, particularly in the new construction and expansion of the track infrastructure, for example by establishing suitable compensation areas. By the end of 2022, we plan to phase out the use of glyphosate, setting ourselves a challenging nature conservation target. Together with scientific partners, we are working on the development of alternative methods.

Climate change is increasingly accompanied by extreme weather events that greatly affect us as infrastructure operators. We want to increase the resilience of DB Group against these risks and develop strategies and measures to be able to react quickly and purposefully in dangerous situations. We promote the efficient use of resources by reusing and recycling materials. Our goal is to keep our waste recycling rate at over 95 %. Particularly where construction waste is concerned, we achieve a very high recycling rate by extensively reusing materials. In the next few years, we will also be increasing our waste management with further development in the area of our other waste, in particular municipal waste. In addition, we are extending the life cycle of our production equipment by redesigning no. 87 rolling stock in particular, and we are using recycled materials and continuously optimizing our material loops. By using innovative 3D printing pro­­cesses no. 149, we manufacture specific replacement parts in-house to reduce the consumption of raw materials in maintenance. We have now printed over 20,000 (replacement) parts in more than 180 different applications.