Shell aims to become a driving force for progress towards more and cleaner energy solutions also in Hungary, together with its customers and the society. Shell has recently taken several steps towards a sustainable future in our country.  Among others, Shell Hungary zRt. announced in December 2021 that it had acquired the LNG filling station at the M0 motorway, which is planned to be the first in its nationwide network to be built in the coming years, to expand its domestic fuel portfolio. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) has significant potential to make transport fuel cleaner and more economical and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heavy goods vehicles.

This February, two new ultrafast chargers were added to the Shell Recharge network at the Péterhegyi út Shell site in Budapest. A few weeks ago, the European Union announced a list of successful Connecting Europe Facility (CEF2) tenders, thanks to which in the near future the Hungarian high-performance (at least 150 kW) electric car charging network will be expanded by 220 charging posts at 70 locations. The investments will give a new boost to the uptake of climate-friendly vehicles in Hungary. Within this, Shell Hungary is going to install 2 ultrafast chargers with 150 kW capacity at 20 retail sites.

In less than a year, the joint effort of Hungarian drivers and Shell has contributed to the offset of more than 44,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide under the Shell Carbon Neutralisation Program, launched last May. This huge amount can best be captured by imagining it in hot air balloons. A hot-air balloon[1] can hold around 1 tonne of gas, meaning that last year, in a fraction of a year, drivers and Shell together extracted more than 44,000 balloons’ worth of CO₂ from the atmosphere – a hot-air balloon festival of that size would be a world record.

Shell also focuses on sustainability of its delicious coffee. In Hungary, Shell launched Shell Café, the new brand for the “concept store” type café and high-quality coffee as well as other products offered by Shell in August 2021.The coffee offered by Shell Café is “Rainforest” certified, confirming that the coffee beans are sourced in accordance with the three main pillars of sustainability – social, economic and environmental. Suppliers and farmers are required to adhere to strict criteria in their production and distribution. International FSC certification then assures customers that the packaging in which Shell Café products are packed uses wood which has been responsibly harvested in accordance with sustainable forestry practices as a raw material.

[1] Calculated with a hot air balloon of 500-560 m³ in which 1 tonne of CO₂ can be charged.

Our newest member is  Spreadmonitor Kft. founded in 2014,  represented by Iljicsov András, with HUF over 130 million sales revenue with 5 employees for 2020. The software development company, which specializes in complex and data-intensive IT problems, delivers IT and data science solutions primarily to the energy sector.

The goal of Spreadmonitor Kft. is to stand out and become a leader among the regional software development companies in terms of sustainability, setting an example to follow and serving as a model for other companies. The company’s environmental responsibility includes reducing their carbon emissions; by purchasing 100 tonnes of Verified Carbon Unit Retirement, they have neutralized 400% of the CO2 they emit by 2018.

In addition, the company strives to use only digital signatures and e-invoicing with all its partners, and they are paying careful attention to selective waste collection. In the name of social responsibility, in 2020 the Juszt-is-teszünk Foundation in 2021 the Jamba Hungary Foundation supported the company with an amount of almost half a million HUF. The goal of Spreadmonitor Kft. is to stand out and become a leader among the regional software development companies in terms of sustainability, setting an example to follow and serving as a model for other companies. They are responsible for their responsible and ethical operations through their annual survey, which is supplemented by a monthly survey and a biennial survey to discuss any problems and current issues facing employees.

Spreadmonitor Kft. is committed to increasing social responsibility and moving towards sustainable development. From their membership, they primarily expect to be able to share knowledge, learn best practices and think together to ensure that sustainability goals are institutionalized within the company.

This year, Legrand is celebrating its 30th anniversary in Hungary. We are looking back a bit at the past this year, but we are also heading towards the future.

Our company, Legrand Hungary, which grew up on the foundations of the former Kontavill, not only successfully integrated from a state-owned company into an international group of companies, but has also become an equal partner of the other subsidiaries, and we have even opened new doors.

The tremendous growth rates of recent years have justified us, and it also played a role in our success that, if necessary, besides our strengths we took on our weaknesses as well.

The world is constantly changing, always at a different pace. If we only look at the last three decades in Hungary, we can remember three situations rewriting everything, which fundamentally shaped the business and economic environment and presented our company with completely new challenges: regime change, the 2008 economic crisis and the Covid pandemic.

However, we believe that if a company was able to or is about to emerge stronger from all three, it is worth paying attention to what it does and how it does it. Legrand Hungary is exactly like this.In recent years, we have managed to blend tradition and innovation and stand in the race for both the graces of consumers and within the group.

We develop based on customer feedback, so we can turn dreams and needs into truly workable solutions.The most common topics in the media are innovations by global tech companies and startups. Anyone who listens to this will see that the future will belong to smart solutions, in our case to smart homes. However, this does not only mean that the devices we offer (switches, controllers, cameras, etc.) must be remotely controllable; we must pay attention to environmental awareness, energy savings and practicality, and to offer our customers user-friendly solutions at affordable prices and, of course, to preserve the Earth for future generations.E-mobility is playing an increasingly important role, with the spread of which various Green’UP ™ vehicle charging solutions have also appeared in Legrand’s offer. All premium chargers are equipped with Bluetooth communication by default, which provides the transfer of charging information and the ability to control charging through a mobile phone application, offering users a simple and fast solution.

In addition to switches and sockets, this is how Legrand Hungary can be present in almost every area of life with excellent solutions and products. Our slogan continues to be ‘Legrand, improving lives’, and we do that to make the lives of our customers and clients easier and better.

As part of its series of sustainability programmes for employees, MAVIR has made several short films having been made available to the general public. We have captured a variety of themes and special moments on our video sharing channel, drawing attention to the fragility of nature’s balance and, consequently, the importance of sustainable operation. Among the topics, we reported on the crane migration in Hortobágy, the Wild Goose Festival of Tata, while the footages shot at the veterinary station of the Budapest Zoo and Botanical Garden, our partner in the rescue and rehabilitation of birds, as well as our activities in the LIFE Danube Free Sky Project – installing bird diverter assemblies over the Danube with the help of drones and the study of bird mortality along transmission lines with a tracking dog – were also included.

Action for the protection of migrating birds with the help of drone technology and tracking dogs

After the ones at Gönyű, Győr, Ercsi and Szigetcsép, another section of the transmission line became bird-friendly: almost 600 bird diverters help the safe migration of birds at the Danube crossing in Százhalombatta. Work over the rivers requires a unique solution, for which we use drones, and, because of the complexity of the task, two drones perform the task parallely: one watching the transmission line and navigating the other that is picking up and installing the bird diverter assembly. This requires the coordinated and precise work of two pilots. In order to plan protection against collision, ornithologists also studied the mortality of birds under the transmission line sections to be found in the Fertő-Hanság and Danube-Ipoly National Parks with the help of tracking dogs. Activities of the LIFE Danube Free Sky Project, encompassing seven Danube countries (Austria, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia and Hungary), aim to make transmission lines over the rivers visible, with the next step of making the section of the just mentioned transmission line across the Little Danube visible for birds.

Red mud is a large-scale hazardous waste that, due to its metal content, is of great value, so its complex recovery is an increasingly urgent issue worldwide.

In the framework of the project  GINOP-2.2.1-15-2017-00106: „Extraction of rare earth elements and secondary raw materials production in the framework of the complex utilization of red mud” led by Martin Metals Ltd, through several years of work in our research institute, we have developed a laboratory-scale technology that has been able to extract and separate the most important (in terms of value) components with high efficiency.

The technology consists of easy-to-implement and scalable steps using accessible and inexpensive chemicals. We placed great emphasis on the recyclability of the chemicals we used, while also maximizing efficiency.

The recovered and separated components can be integrated into the production processes of different raw materials (Al-, Fe-, Ti-production) with little effort, and we obtained approximately one hundred times the enrichment of the most important micro-constituent (scandium) compared to the starting red mud.

Contact us: www.bayzoltan.hu