Volunteering with an environmental impact

Throughout the country, the Mexican Banking System has led important initiatives for the care and conservation of the environment, species and habitats in danger. In the same manner, it has run cleaning campaigns with the support of hundreds of volunteers, which involve employees, their families, suppliers and customers. These actions seek to permeate the importance of caring for our natural environment in the awareness of everyone. In 2014, important reforestation and environmental education activities were held in alliance with social organizations such as Reforestamos México A.C. Throughout the year, we managed to motivate hundreds of people and we totaled 297,000 hours of volunteer work, which had a highly positive impact on our environment.

Savings of Supplies
Due to its activity, the Banking System does not have a significant direct impact on the environment. However, we are constantly implementing initiatives to reduce the use of our main supplies, such as water, paper and power. We foster actions to reduce reuse, waste, thereby generating a positive impact on our operation at economic and environmental level.

Water
The installation of water saving equipment and systems in the bathrooms of offices and branches, water treatment plants for use in irrigation, cooling towers and other strategies for its use allowed us to save 81.1 million liters of water throughout the year.

Energy
The installation of energy-saving bulbs and luminaries, presence sensors, consumption metering systems and eco-efficient air- conditioning equipment in offices and branches are some of the initiatives implemented by the financial institutions to control and reduce power consumption, which enables 65.7 million KW to be saved in 2014.

Papel
The use of printing control codes, the configuration of printers to print on both sides of the paper, awareness campaigns, the reduction of the number of hours of contracts and forms for customers and the promotion of initiatives to send paperless statements of accounts by email to customers and employees are some of the most relevant activities implemented by banking offices and branches, all of which resulted in savings of 62,259 tons of paper throughout the year.

Waste
The management, recycling and reuse of office and branch waste now reflects significant advantages for the institutions. Some of them are conducting the final disposal of waste with the help of expert providers (in some cases, social organizations), which guarantees the correct disposal and the generation of revenues to be allocated to social and environmental causes.

In our associates’ installations, and even in the Association’s own installations, internal campaigns are run to promote the correct separation of waste, prevent the use of Unicel and encourage the recycling of electronic equipment, alkaline batteries and other elements.

In 2014, the aforementioned activities collected 266,703 tons of waste, which were recycled, reused or disposed of correctly in order to prevent environmental damage.