Good day to everyone. Welcome to the conference call on ESG topics and the ROCKWOOL Sustainability Report 2022. My name is Thomas Harder. I'm Director of Group Treasury and Investor Relations of ROCKWOOL A/S. Today, I'm pleased to present CEO Jens Birgersson, CFO Kim Junge Andersen, and Director of Public Affairs and Sustainability Anthony Abbotts. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. First, we'll go through our presentation of today's ESG topic, the ROCKWOOL Sustainability Report 2022. Afterwards, we will be ready to answer all your good questions. Jens Birgersson, I will now hand over the words to you.
Thank you, Thomas. Good morning, everyone. We are happy to be here again. We have reduced the number of sustainability calls before we ran these more frequent ones. Now we have the annual one, and the main speaker today will be Anthony. I will cover a couple of topics to start with. If you first look with, you know, our primary handprint in the world, we will come into the footprint also, is to drive energy efficiency. The way we looked at this is that it's a triple win. We sometimes call it the C model, but it has social, economic, and environmental positive impacts.
We could see that if we just apply the EU Building Directive that has been decided upon to achieve the Paris Agreement goals by 2030, 2034, that would mean that 40-50 million buildings over the next 10 years would have to be renovated in the EU. Looking at that, those 50 million buildings and the number of people in Europe that live in a house that suffer under fuel poverty, that means almost all the income goes to heat in the building. They can't afford it. Doing 40, 50 million buildings would, if you choose the right buildings, would remove 50 million household from fuel poverty.
If you assume the European statistics, there are 2.2 people per building, that means you have almost 104 million people that would be brought out of fuel poverty. There you have an example that on the one hand, obviously you create a lot of jobs when you do the renovation. You have the environmental impact, but you also have the social impact, and you would be able to address that almost a quarter of the EU population that live in under fuel poverty conditions. If you look at the market at the moment, we conclude that many industrial segments are still doing fine, but we see a quite drastic decline in many European countries in the residential segment.
We think that that would be a good opportunity to use some of all these huge funds that exist in the EU and start to work towards those targets because the labor force, if not freed up yet with the current trends in the construction industry, we believe that soon we will get to a point where you can shift all the resources from those new builds that don't happen into renovation or energy efficiency renovation. Another observation is that since September 2021, we have seen this very volatile energy prices in the EU.
When we sum up the amount of direct support that have been provided to residents facing energy costs that are too high or at least so high that the government feels they need to subsidize or pay out money to soften the burden of those energy costs, that money, those funds that have been used across the EU now is EUR 700 billion. If that money instead would have been used for renovating and improving energy efficiency, you would have basically touched 8% of all buildings in Southern, Central, and Northern Europe. That's astonishing. Just in less than a year, EUR 700 billion of subsidy has been paid out, and that would have paid almost one-tenth of the renovation, which is also would be a good step forward.
In general, we think that if now the decline in the construction market continues and the goals are kept and the EU is determined to deliver on the building directive on the climate goals, then we will see increased activity from that. Over to you, Anthony.
Thanks, Jens. If we move to slide three, Sustainability Highlights, and then again to slide four. We consider 2022 to be a strong year for tangible sustainability impacts. We've now met all five intermediate sustainability goals that we set back in 2016, having a baseline of 2015. We'll get back to those goals later in the presentation. To mention a couple of areas, we've made significant improvements within energy efficiency of our own offices, and we have also achieved improvements in regard to the decarbonization of our own factories. We appreciate the recognition that we got from Corporate Knights here at the start of the year. Corporate Knights, they're producing global sustainability rankings based on corporate sustainability performance.
We were ranked as the 16th most sustainable company globally and number one among building product manufacturers. We can also mention the two prestigious awards that we received in the course of the year, one in France, one in Denmark, both associated with our Rockcycle services, and we'll get back to the Rockcycle services later in the presentation. If we move on to slide number five, sustainability ratings and indexes. At a general level, our ESG ratings are good. On top of receiving the recognition from Corporate Knights, for the first time, we improved our rating for MSCI. We now have an AA rating. What we do know, of course, as most of you also know, methodologies are not harmonized when it comes to ESG ratings.
As a result, the weighting and the focus varies from rating agency to rating agency. I think we've mentioned it at previous calls, underline it here. What's important for us is to focus on what is most material. Of course, that can mean that we're not aligned completely with some of the different rating agencies. If we look at the different methodologies, then Corporate Knights, for example, the product handprint, in terms of green revenue, is scored very high. For other ratings, the focus is predominantly on the footprint. One metric that we consider remains particularly immature, is the carbon intensity metric per revenue.
This metric typically is based only on Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which means that companies that have outsourced the majority of their production, they're going to be performing best. Clearly, we consider the best way to benchmark when you look at that particular metric is to, of course, also include Scope 3 emissions. However, we understand in some sectors, the disclosure of Scope 3 emissions is still not prioritized. If we move on to slide six, sustainability progress, and again to slide seven. This is also some statements that we have iterated in previous calls. It's important for us, though, to underline it and to highlight it.
It's important to say, for example, that we base our sustainability disclosures on facts, and often they're backed up by third-party references and methodologies in order to ensure credibility. We had external insurance for six of our sustainability goals last year, and in the course of 2022, we extended that scope to seven sustainability goals. The ones we added related to Scope 1 and 2 SBT. We've also added or extended the assurance scope to cover diversity and governance metrics. Of course, going forward, we're going to continue this assurance and increase the scope. If we move to slide number eight. We added, in the course of 2022, an additional SDG that we want to commit to and work actively in contributing towards.
That's SDG number 14, Life Below Water. Why do we do that? 80% of marine and coastal pollution originates on land. That's a lot of pollution, a lot of waste. Since 40% of the world's population lives in coastal areas, it matters how we build new buildings, it matters how we renovate old buildings, and it matters what happens with the construction waste that's coming from those buildings. Therefore, we believe that everybody has a responsibility to ensure that we're protecting our oceans. One of the things we've done in the course of 2022 is establish a collaboration with the Ocean Disclosure Project.
This will give us more insight into understanding the impacts that we have on the ocean through science-based guidelines and metrics. Going forward, of course, our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of our products in the value chain, they're going to help to protect life below water. Water management within our factories further supports our efforts within SDG 14. We're constantly reducing fresh water use. We ensure that there are no process wastewater discharges into the environment. It's important to note here that water consumption in the mineral wool industry is much lower than for other materials. Of course, last but not least, we're able to recycle processed water in closed loop systems.
That means that water is either staying at the factory or it's being treated at municipal wastewater treatment stations. Often, most of the water, it's evaporating from the production process. If we move forward to slide number nine. I mentioned at the start that we have six sustainability goals, plus the two science-based targets that we introduced back in 2019. If we look at the performance of our six sustainability goals, we met all five intermediate goals 2022 in the course of the year. That, we believe, is a very good achievement. We set these back in 2016. We consider them to be very ambitious.
Therefore, we're proud that we got across the line with these. We'll go into a bit more detail in relation to some of those later in the presentation. One goal we would like to highlight here is the CO2 emission intensity goal. As we know, carbon intensity is not the same as absolute emissions. It's basically CO2 emissions per ton stone wool produced. That is also why we set science-based targets in 2019, so we have also goals on absolute emissions. But it's important to underline here that improving carbon intensity is a prerequisite for achieving our science-based targets. In 2022, we achieved a 17% improvement, and that's compared to baseline 2015.
That means that we're getting extremely close to already achieving the 2030 goal of 20% improvement. What's contributing to that improvement, it's continuous focus on energy efficiency, it's our technology innovation in the melting, and it's our circularity efforts. If we move to slide number 10. Over to you, Jens.
Thank you, Anthony. We had a goal, or we have had a goal, and we probably need to reformulate that a little bit going forward. To reduce the lost time injury frequency rate to ratio with 10%, that is the number of lost time incidents per million man hours. We had good progress in 2022. It's quite hard from this level to work it down, but obviously that is completely overshadowed that we had a fatality in Poland. What happened there was that a piece of material got stuck in a machine, and when that happens, if you want to remove it, you stop the machine, you switch off the power to the machine, and you put a padlock on the circuit breaker, and then you can then remove it. That's the procedure we have had always, I think.
Our machines are big and they are continuous processing machines, so they keep running unless you stop it and you switch it off. What happened here was that the person, the victim here switched it off, but forgot to switch off the power, so the machine restarted while he was in the machine. It's very, very tragic. This has led us to rethink a little bit our approach. We will continue to work on lost time incidents, but at the level we are now, the economic impact of that is obviously insignificant. There's very little, few days that are lost because people are injured. When you look at the type of injuries, a lot is trips, falls, cut the finger, relatively minor things.
We are changing the strategy a little bit, and that is that we now focus on really, really going after serious incidents and to simplify our framework. It doesn't help when you have instructions for how to walk safely down the stair. At the end, you have so many instructions and guidelines that you lose focus on the dangerous things, the things that can lead to serious injury or even a fatality. We have reworked that, and we have also gone in with an approach to increase the accountability for serious incidents, and also that everything serious or all work around that reaches my desk all the time. We don't have many, but if we see something, we see that it happens, then we go in all the factories and try to remove the risk altogether.
We will see now if we manage to improve this going forward. That is basically the shift we have done. Yes, we met the goal, but it's completely overshadowed that we lost one of our employees.
Thanks, Jens. If we move to slide number 10. I mentioned the science-based targets in one of the previous slides. Progress on that compared to 2019 baseline, then we reduced absolute greenhouse gas emissions, so that's CO2 equivalents, Scope 1 and 2 by 4%, and Scope 3 emissions by 1%. Remember, our overall goal by 2034 is to reduce absolute emissions in the life cycle equivalent to 1 million tons of CO2 equivalents. 1 million tons. That doesn't take into account growth. That means that any growth needs to be carbon neutral. We know going forward that our decarbonization trajectory will not be linear. There will be ups and there will be downs between now and 2034.
Our continued focus on conversions to low carbon melting technology, coupled with commissioning factories based on electric melting technology, will have significant impacts on carbon emissions going forward. A couple of examples from what we achieved in 2022. Most recently, our newly opened factory in Qingyuan, China, started operations using electric melting technology. We expect, when we're in full production, that we'll be able to reduce annual CO2 emissions by more than 60% compared to the decommissioned factory it replaces. Elsewhere, our manufacturing facility in Mississippi, USA, successfully transitioned from coal to natural gas during 2022, and we expect that we're going to be able to save up to 30% in CO2 emissions annually due to our melting technology.
That means now today that both our US factories are running on natural gas. If we move to slide number 12. I mentioned at the start that the last intermediate goal that we still needed to meet in the course of 2022, that was energy efficiency on our offices. We got across the line. We managed, in the course of 2022, to finalize the deep renovation of nine offices. That meant that we achieved an overall energy efficiency improvement compared to the baseline of 2015 of 39%. In order to do that, we're achieving energy efficiency improvements of up to +80%. To date, we have renovated now 17 of our offices globally.
We consider this to be quite an achievement, particularly considering the delay impact that came from the COVID pandemic. Our own experience with doing these renovations demonstrates, and Jens talked a little bit about it at the start, deep renovation makes sense socially, environmentally, and economically, providing healthy workplaces for our employees and generating significant carbon emission reductions compared to new build. If we look at CO2, can come with one example here, and that's at our the renovation of our Nordic headquarters, where a third party calculated that the renovation actually reduced CO2 emissions by around 45%, compared to if we had demolished and built a new one.
You know, finally, I'd like to say that, not least, deeply renovating our offices is of course giving us more know-how, helping us to better understand how our products can be used and the positive impacts of those products. If we move to slide number 13. Circularity. We've talked at previous ESG calls about the role of circularity. It's extremely important, von der Leyen, she said once that the carbon emission reductions that we need to achieve to get to carbon neutrality in Europe in 2050, 50% needs to come from circularity actions. You know, when we talk about circularity at ROCKWOOL, of course, recycling through our Rockcycle service is central to our ambitions.
In 2022, we increased the numbers of countries where we offer our takeback services to 19. We managed to add Finland and Romania. What's important here is that when we tick the box and say that we offer a Rockcycle service in a particular country, then there's a set of criteria that these countries need to meet. And that criteria is audited by our external auditors. We also increased the volume of stone wool that we recycled by 6% compared to the previous year. To date, we are now recycling 68,000 tons of stone wool through our Rockcycle takeback systems. In some markets, our recycling service is a USP. I can give you one example.
In 2022, we won a renovation project for a 28,000 sq. m. renovation of a by a large housing association in Berlin. We won that project mainly because of our Rockcycle offering. There's of course, increasing focus from a regulatory perspective on recycling and recyclable products. Again, in Berlin, the government has amended the regulation on procurement and environment for public buildings so that from 2024, only reusable and recyclable insulation materials in public building projects can be used. Here in that regulation, Rockcycle is specifically mentioned. In 2022, we also upcycled 680,000 tons of waste material from other industries, so it's important to remember that for us, circularity is not just about Rockcycle.
It's an important part of it, but the fact that we're able to also upcycle, recycle material from other industry, and that's leading to an average non-virgin content of a project, products of 25%. Of course, that percentage will vary depending on the product. Circularity is more than recycling. We talk about the fact that, of course, our material is nature-based, originating from an extremely abundant resource, volcanic stone. Of course, the fact that it's durable, durability, lifetime performance is also a parameter that is often forgotten within circularity. Our products have a performance of over 60 years without deterioration, which is not something you can say about all materials. Of course, it's fire safe. It doesn't contain flame retardants.
If we move to slide number 14. We have talked many times in the past, about the fact that our water intensity goal is one of the most challenging of our sustainability goals, simply because water is so cheap, and therefore there's not an immediate economic incentive at our factories to improve water efficiency. However, since we set the goal back in 2016, we've had a continuous management focus on water savings, and that's resulted in a 14% improvement compared to baseline 15. That's slightly lower than last year, but still well above the intermediate goal of 10%. We also carried out a water scarcity assessment, that we had previously carried out in 2017.
Here we identified a total of five ROCKWOOL manufacturing sites that were located in areas of high or extreme high water stress. Of course, going forward, we're going to have a extra focus on these sites. It's important, however, to say and underline that in all cases, the factory's water usage is estimated to be immaterial, using less than 1 per mille of available water in the relevant basin. If we turn to biodiversity and what we've been doing within the biodiversity space. We manage risks to biodiversity sensitive areas from our factories through compliance to environmental permits and conformance to our own standards and environmental systems, management systems. In 2022, we carried out a detailed mapping to determine the location of biodiversity sensitive areas on or in close proximity to our global stone wool factories.
We managed to identify special biodiversity value on a number of our manufacturing sites. Going forward, we're going to be looking at enhancing such areas by initiating specific biodiversity enhancement projects. One example of that is or an example of a potential for doing that is on our UK site where there's good opportunities of increasing or improving the connectivity of the different ecological areas that are on that site. If we move to slide number 15. Moving to the social area, we carried out a number of actions to strengthen our work within the social area in 2022. We strengthened our commitments to human rights in a number of ways.
A couple of them, one, a revision of the group code of conduct, which sits now with the board of directors. An approval of a strengthened, dedicated human rights policy that's replacing our former human rights commitment. What are our commitments to human rights? They're supporting the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ten principles defined in the UN Global Compact. They're conducting human rights due diligence through a dedicated due diligence process, and we moved along in that space in the course of 2022. Continuously identifying, preventing, and mitigating impacts both in our own operations and value chain, and of course, having dialogue with potentially affected groups, and that can be both internally and externally.
What we did also in 2022 was conduct a risk assessment to identify salient human rights risks, which are listed on the slide. That resulted in assessments, specific assessments in Malaysia and Thailand. The conclusion from that was that we developed some new group guidelines associated with temporary employees that are contracted by recruitment agencies to ensure that those people have the same conditions as our full-time employees. If we move to slide number 16. Diversity and business ethics. When you look at our performance in 2022, our level of gender diversity at middle and executive management level, that remained stable compared to previous years at 28%. We have a goal between 25%-35%.
Ilse Huynen was elected to the board in the course of 2022, resulting in the 2024 goal of 33% of shareholder elected board members being women. We handled, in the course of the year, 11 qualified whistleblower cases. When you look at the whistleblower cases, they involve corruption, health and safety, harassment, fraud, and a policy violation. We've carried out investigations into those cases, and it has resulted in four people being dismissed, four employees being subject to disciplinary actions. Other cases resulted in policy and internal procedure changes. That was our sustainability performance and overview and highlights from that. We would now like to turn to policy development.
What's happening in the policy space, particularly relating to ROCKWOOL. If we turn to slide number 18. A conversation that we've had for quite a while now with you guys relates to taxonomy. It's important to say here that taxonomy and the regulations around taxonomy are still not fully mature. There are still guidance documents that are being developed, and as a result, there are still interpretations that are being made around how to assess, not least taxonomy, alignment. In the course of 2022, we calculated that 87% of our revenue is taxonomy eligible. Then what we did was that we carried out a Do No Significant Harm assessment in order to determine the level of alignment.
Here, we had to assess compliance to six areas. Those six areas are listed on the, on the slide. Our assessment showed, based on our current knowledge and the interpretation of the regulations, that for five of the areas, we are fully aligned, although for a number of the criteria, we will need to do further investigations. One example of an additional investigation relates to climate change. We analyzed two alternative climate change scenarios: a high physical impact scenario, which is four degrees Celsius, and a so-called rapid transition scenario, whereby climate warming is limited to two degrees Celsius.
Here we looked at two time horizons, 2030 and 2050. What the analysis showed was that whilst the physical climate related risks across our global manufacturing sites will not change significantly for either time horizon or either scenario for that matter, in the foreseeable future, new potential climate related risks have been identified at certain sites. Therefore, our task going forward will be to collaborate with relevant business units to ensure that mitigation plans for all applicable physical climate related risks are in place and assessed at regular intervals. For one of the criteria, and that's the criteria relating to pollution prevention and control, we identified the use of one chemical for the binder, formaldehyde, which was covered by the taxonomy, Appendix C.
We assessed the use of formaldehyde to qualify for the derogation essential use for society for the main part of our product range, as there are no better alternatives to guarantee the needed performance that are acceptable for environment and health. However, for part of our light stone wool product range, we identified alternative binder solutions that exist in the market and therefore, it was our assessment that the essential to society derogation could not be claimed for these products. That resulted therefore in a lower taxonomy aligned revenue than the taxonomy eligible revenue equivalent to 59%. We move to slide number 19. One of the significant changes in the course of the year from a regulatory perspective related to the solar rooftop initiative.
Which is a legal amendment to the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which is basically phasing in the installation of solar energy installations on buildings, and it's a legal obligation. It means that on all new public and commercial buildings larger than 250 sq. m., solar panels will need to be installed from 2027. That will, that scope will be extended to existing public and co-commercial buildings in 2028, and then on all new residential buildings from 2029. We expect now that based on this, PV panels will likely be the standard on all future flat roofs.
When you look at the installation market volume of PV flat roof, then it's estimated to be around 30 million sq. m. per year in 2030, increasing to 50 million by 2040. What's important here is to emphasize the importance of fire safety when we're talking about PV panels. PV panel installations are an ignition source for roof fires. They radiate heat back to the roof, covering increasing fire spread and intensity. PV panel fires are actually very difficult to extinguish. It goes without saying that stone wool used below PV panels protects the building from such fires. Maybe a last comment, a number of insurance companies, and you can see the quote there from Allianz there on the slide.
A number of insurance companies, they discourage the installation of PV systems on industrial and commercial buildings with combustible roofs. We move to slide number 20. As you're probably aware, there's also been quite a lot of developments within two main areas from the EU policy side that has an impact on our business. The one is the Energy Efficiency Directive, and the second one the Energy Performance in Buildings Directive. If we take the first one first, the Energy Efficiency Directive, what the EU Parliament Council and Commission have agreed on is the need for a binding 2030 energy target. That will be the first time this will be binding.
Compared to existing legislation, that will lead to an additional savings of about 100 million tons oil equivalent in 2030. That goes on top of the additional savings that are already being achieved by current legislation. Just to put that into perspective, that's 6 times Denmark's annual energy use. When you look at the Energy Efficiency Directive historically, then it's focused only on central government buildings, which is less than half a percent of the building stock. The requirements going forward will be to increase that to all types of public building. Therefore, we expect the directive to cover about 3%-5% of the overall stock.
When we look at the EPBD, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, it will be introducing mandatory minimum energy performance standards for Europe. That means approximately 250 million buildings that will be covered by this and ensuring that the least efficient buildings are renovated by the mid-2030s. There's different positions when it comes to the EPBD. The commission, the council and the parliament, they have different ambitions. The commission, they want to renovate classes F and G with the exemption for historical buildings and secondary homes. The parliament wants to also include class E, whilst the council is interested in getting an overall improvement that is equivalent to average class D by 2033.
There's different positions, but what we do expect, irrespective of which position is followed, that the EU renovation rate will be doubled. More importantly, we expect that there will be more focus on deeper renovations with the co-benefits that that brings. For us, the key point is that this legislation leads to a steady financial, administrative and logistical support for renovation over the next decade. It provides predictability. At the moment, there is quite a variation within the different countries. You have countries like Holland that are clear leaders. 30% of the building stock has to be renovated by 2030.
You have other countries, for example, Italy, that have used massively subsidies, but then encountered difficulties and decided to cut back support. Having that harmonized long-term support and focus, that is important. If we move to slide number 21. We've given you there six examples of what's happening in member states, different member states. The picture varies. Overall, it's important to say that about 10% of the EU recovery funds have been allocated to renovation. Overall, the EU's 2021-2027 budget provides about EUR 110 billion for renovation, which is more than double the previous benefits on the previous budgets.
The benefits are obvious, but the governments, they still need to support scaling up the renovation programs in order to deliver meaningful results. In Germany, around EUR 2.5 billion has been allocated from the recovery funds for renovation, but the domestic budget for that area is much higher. It's around EUR 15 billion. In Romania is planning to renovate thousands of public buildings. A lot of these, the big Soviet era apartment blocks. Of course, it's important to ensure that these are in-depth renovations. We're seeing good examples that not least in Lithuania, that is requiring renovations up to Class B. Spain, if we look at Spain, the renovation budget has increased at least tenfold.
Administrative and technical capacity to allocate and spend the funds, that still needs to catch up. We're seeing positive signs. For example, in Barcelona, they've set up a one-stop shop, which is staffed by architects and experts from other organizations. This is helping to support homeowners in giving them technical support and practical support when it comes to applying for funds and identifying workers that can do the work. I think that's all I want to say on the ED and the EPBD. We move to North America and the slide number 22. The US Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. $370 billion has been allocated to the US Climate Action Plan.
That's the largest investment in climate change mitigation adaptation in their history. When you look at the IRA, it consists of a number of different programs. Which are meant to reduce energy costs and increase the use of renewable energy and grow the American-made supply chain of energy efficient products and services. There's a number of different incentives which are designed for both new and retrofit construction with different target audiences. When we look at the IRA, we see the biggest role, the most important role that it's playing is increasing awareness in general about the benefits of energy efficiency.
Of course, this is coming from the federal level, we also need to be aware that there's a lot happening at the city level. We're seeing good examples of local legislation driving renovation in New York, in Boston, in D.C., and in Chicago. They're requiring various types of energy benchmarking and building performance standards which are above and beyond anything that is actually driven by the federal government. What's important also to emphasize here is that these cities, they also have high performance building hubs that have been established to provide local support to the building industry to achieve these citywide climate goals. There's a lot happening also at the city level.
Okay, that was, the section relating to policy. If we move to slide 23, and to slide 24. Over to you, Jens.
Yeah. Thank you, Anthony. Looking forward now, we have reached the halfway mark, and as Anthony said, we are quite proud that we delivered on those because when we defined those targets back in 2016, we didn't have a super clear path or plan for everything. We said we should be able to do this. So that's good progress. Now we haven't changed the goals. Obviously, if we can deliver on them earlier than 2030, we will do that. We're going to keep working. Going forward, we see also that we need to separate a little bit now, the sustainability reporting. We have had audited numbers for that we report to you.
Now we see the reporting burden increase massively due to new directives, more sustainability numbers that needs to be audited than financial numbers, basically, going forward. It's important that we manage to do that on the one hand without losing focus of what matters. On the one hand, we get more bureaucracy, more things to audit, more, I would say, some of it irrelevant that we will audit, but we need to keep focus on our goals. If we sum up 2022, what we did on the handprint, that's of course the number one thing we do, the sold products we delivered 2022 per year, installed will save 19 TWh. That's a lot. That's a number of nuclear plants.
Depending if you divide by 10,000 kWh per home or 20,000, you're talking 1 million-2 million home or 2 million-5 million people. The energy for those people, that is just gone. That's obviously great progress and very motivating, and that will keep ticking in. To continue progress towards our 2030 goals and the 2034 Science-Based Target Goal, at the moment, we have annual plan of about EUR 100 million, and that we want to keep investing downturn, upturn, booming conditions, et cetera. We just keep doing that. The current one we are doing, the biggest one at the moment is the Flumroc greenification of the plant in Switzerland. That's in full progress. After Christmas, we start with the commissioning of that.
Now it's high season soon, and we cannot do a switchover or start that up. All of those projects where we go for greenification, we need to make sure we have green and affordable power into the plants. We are doing quite a few investments where we are prepping the plants for replacing fossil fuel with electricity. Some of the projects we do is just thinking ahead and investing in power plants in countries where we are sure we can get green electricity. We have announced one greenfield also in addition to since last we spoke, and that is in Romania, where we build another line. Again, it will be a green line with, driven with, renewable electricity.
That would be just parallel on the same site to our plant in Ploiești, about 80, 90 km north of Bucharest in Romania. That, that project, you know, we haven't broken ground yet, but we have the ground, and we are starting that project up. That is a green greenfield, so to say, that is coming now. Our intention is to keep expanding capacity, also, in spite of that, for example, the residential market in Europe is down at the moment. We just stay steady on the course and keep making our footprint green as we move forward at a steady pace. Thank you.
We are ready to take questions if there are any. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for the speakers, please press star then one. Please hold until we have the first question. Please note we will start with two questions per participant. Please respect this. Again, to ask a question, please press star one. Our first question will come from Cedar Ekblom with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, sir. Cedar, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Sorry. Can you hear me now? Hopefully, you can hear me. Hi, everyone. I have a quick question just as it relates to the renovation that you're talking about for buildings in Europe. Do you think it matters that ROCKWOOL sells a single product in general when it comes to the renovation opportunity? When you talk to your customers about renovation and in your own examples that you've had of renovating your own office blocks, how do you position yourself as a single product producer? I don't know if you're willing to make any comments, obviously, on what's happened in the Danish press over the last couple of days, as it relates to the operations in Russia. I don't know if you'll make any comments on that. Thank you.
Thank you, Cedar. I can comment both of those. No problem. I don't think, you know, a lot of product is sold via distribution and sold via building markets or big box, whatever. I don't think it makes a lot of difference if you're a one-stop shop manufacturer or not, because you don't have the outlet. You need so many things for renovation, and you have flows to the building sites. There are going to be different segments. If you look, if you're going to renovate a flat roof, and you're going to have solar on it, obviously, there is a big advantage to have stone because it's the only non-combustible solution for a flat roof.
If you renovate a roof, if you do a facade, it's going to be an advantage to have, you know, is the combustibility and circularity could also be a big issue. I don't see the one-stop shop really matter that much in our. When we do our own projects, of course, we source the insulation and the acoustic ceilings from ourself and all the other things that you need a renovation, we just, you know, get the contractor to deliver. I don't see that.
Can I just ask before you go on to the Russia thing? You made a good example of the solar roofs, right? You need stone wool there. If you were selling the full solution rather than selling the stone wool maybe to someone else that then creates the solution and on sells it to the customer, do you leave margin on the table? I appreciate you'll still be very levered to the growth story. I fully understand that. In not selling the solution offering, is that leaving margin on the table for someone else to capture that then goes to the customer and sells the solar roof with your stone wool integrated in that offering?
I mean.
I understand, you know, the position of the business.
My view on this, I mean, my first two years was on the building site. When I was graduated as an engineer, I spent two years in Africa on the site. My view actually for construction is that there are industries where the solution gives premium margins, but my experience is that being a solution provider, if it means you take a turnkey responsibility, very often means lower margins. I think solution turnkey, there are not many players around that have proven that they earn more money by putting all together. On the other hand, when you have a solution, let's say we have one in Germany, it's called Conlit for pipe insulation, where we have the hangers for, you know, tube piping, we have the tape, we have the foil, we have all of that.
It's like a collection of products to complete the job, then, I think you can see that you grab more of the margin. It depends a little bit. I, you know, at the moment, if you look at Etex, there we actually offer, you know, the stone wool, and we have two units that actually manufacture the plaster and all the things you need for it, almost all of the. Again, that business is quite tough and margins are not very great. I, I'm not convinced of that solution strategy. I believe you need to have profitable products, and I don't think it hurts to have several products in the, in the package.
I don't, for example, say we would make more money on a flat roof or have better chances if you had a membrane, for example, the way the market is structured today. Okay? Should I move on to Russia, Cedar? It's a bit of a big topic. Basically, Denmark and the rest of the world are a little bit different. In Denmark, the discussion that came up in conjunction with the anniversary was that we should have known after Crimea that it would go bad with Russia, and, therefore, we shouldn't have had any business in Russia. Yeah. It's kind of a moral aspect to it. Our view there, we absolutely didn't suspect that the Ukrainian war would happen.
I was, for example, at the economic forum in St. Petersburg together with 1,000 international business leader and probably 50 top 500 CEOs in the world, and Guterres was there. We absolutely didn't believe it. It has been a lot of the morals of we should have known. If you look at the sanctions from the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 up to the onset of the war when the 2022 sanctions, the 10, 9, 10 packages started, the sanction at that stage was for dual-use products to Crimea. Yeah. Dual-use means that you have a product that has a civil application, but can use to suppress human rights or launch terrorist attacks. It's defined like that, but basically that the product can have a military use. stone wool has never and still is not classified as that. No wonder.
I mean, a soft material that insulates against heat and cold does what it does. There hasn't been any sanctions that applies to us that we are in breach of. Then they started, and the Business Authority, I think they are called, it's called the Erhvervsstyrelsen. I think it's called the Business Authority in English. They went out to the press and said they would launch an investigation. We learned this from the press. We were very surprised about that. We have received a letter, and it's general questions in the letter, and we're very confident in the coming days, we will respond to all of that and get that out of the way as I see it, because we have at all times being in full compliance with the sanctions.
There's also been this talk about that we have delivered products to nuclear-proof buildings and all this, you know, interior wall insulations, like a project back in 2015, where the defense ministry bought ROCKWOOL insulation through normal distribution and put it in interior walls, you know, double gypsum interior walls, and also put it under the floors to reduce noise between different floors inside the building. Absolutely doesn't nuclear-proof a building. A lot of those I regard as quite sensational stories, and it has made a lot of headlines here in Denmark, and we don't see it anywhere else. We take it serious, we answer it, and we will address it all.
It's, it's, it, we are very confident about that we stick to all sanctions, and we are not in breach of anything. If we go back to the fundamental approach we have taken for staying in Russia, and that is, A, we don't feel we should reward a next-level oligarch or the Russian state or whoever gets it, a future competitor with a multibillion-dollar worth world-leading asset with our latest technology. We don't feel that reward is the right thing to do. We also see that by taking royalty and dividends out of Russia, we can't see that it's better for the world that we do that than that we leave it in the country. We also have quite a substantial rebuilding approach, contributing to Ukraine. The whole tech transfer.
At the moment, we are 4x bigger than number two in stone wool globally. Those factories in Russia are state-of-the-art, the best we have, ranked among the top five. We simply don't want to lose that. Where we leave it at the moment is we adhere to absolutely every sanction.
If a sanction would come up to say that we are not allowed to hold the shares for those assets, we would, of course, take action on that. We don't feel it's a good approach to give those assets away for a ruble or two. We maintain that and we are dealing with these issues in the press and that questionnaire. I would call it a questionnaire when we don't interpret that as very deep questions that they have sent us. We will respond to that and come back to that. I'm confident that we will clear that up.
Have they asked you, like, is there a timeframe or is it just open-ended?
I think we will be able to respond within a couple of days. Then with governmental authorities, I think, what? Four weeks, six weeks maximum or something like that, at the most. Of course we are interested to get this out of the way and we have every intention to be transparent.
Great. Thanks very much for all the detail.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Brijesh Kumar Siya with HSBC. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. I have two questions and primarily relates to one is on Russia and the other one is little other things. The first one is on Russia. When at the face does talk about Russian operations of [inaudible] , are you kind of, if I heard it clearly, with and to your clear answer to say that is that you have kind of these products being bought from a distributor and not any of your Russian counterparts were involved in supplying those to the military establishments per se?
Okay. It was very poor quality line, but I think you talked about distribution to military and sales to military, right?
Yes.
In Russia. Was that the question? Okay.
I was just thinking whether any of your colleagues in Russia were involved in supplying that to the military or if they bought it from the distributor?
Yeah. You know, before 2014, we, you know, we're talking 10 years back in time. The last 10 years, we have not had any direct customer relation or invoicing to military, just to be clear. We changed that already at the Crimea illegal annexation. I can't say that we had any business before. It's not our model. There are two cases there. For example, if you do an interior renovation in Moscow of a public building, this happened to be a defense building. They buy from distribution or a special distributor. In Russia, since we are a leading supplier in the specification, sometimes the specification goes, should be renovated with stone wool or rock wool type, or it could be the name of their competitor.
That's quite common in many markets. Standard products, you just buy it in the market. That's the case. We come with the military vessel, or it was a supply vessel, I think. There you have a structure in Russia that we have never had direct relations with the ship-shipyards. They buy through a marine supplier of approved products. And again, it's bought through distribution. There has never been an invoice. What is the insulation typically to a boat? It is around hot pipes. Yeah. Around hot pipes, you have a tube in a boat. It's like in a processing plants. Actually the portfolio is very similar that you use for refineries.
You put it around primarily hot pipes, and then you have another product between compartments. It's basically like an interior wall with two layers of something hard, and then you have a piece of fire non-combustible stone wool in between. Another product you see a lot in this is that you have a flat slab of stone wool. It could also be glass wool, obviously not from us. You have like a chicken net on it, so you can mold it around a ventilation duct or something. Those are the type of applications, obviously none of them are dual-use still today. I mean, we don't have dual-use products. There is no military application, they're doing relatively mundane tasks. There is no direct relation. It goes through distribution.
As I've said, per day in Europe, excluding Russia, we ship more than 14,000 packages of stone wool and distribution is selling, you know. We have, on the other hand, been very careful. If we see a new customer, say, or an old customer in some countries, in Middle East, some other countries at the outskirts of Europe, if they ramp up demands for what they buy today and we don't know the end product, we will not deliver. We have a process for that to stop gray imports and stop that as far as we can. Of course, 14,000 packages per day is in any market, we are not in control in all the end use of it. Again, remember, it's not a dual-use product according to the EU.
It's a just a basic building material, right?
Understood. I just clarify one thing. How much is your distribution sale when you compare the total sales in total? Would you say the distribution channel is close to 80%-90% of total sales?
It depends, Brijesh. It depends per country. I will answer wrong if I try to say per country. In the US, for example, you have a bigger big box portion. When you come to Poland, you have a lot of project business because people build so many square, big commercial buildings. There you typically bid projects to contractors. I can't say. Generally, we have a relatively small direct sales ourself. I mean, on the marine side in Russia, we have nothing, no sales. Now we stopped the products. We don't produce them anymore. We don't sell them. On the construction site, there are some direct project business with installers or contractors that do installation work. Generally, we try to sell via distribution.
I can't give you any percentages because I don't have them in my head, and we don't normally talk about that. All channels exist, and depending on what segment grows, it flows around a bit.
Got it. No, that's pretty clear. I just sort of one last question. It's on about the recyclability. you have kind of aggressively expanded to 19 countries. when I look at the volume growth or the recycling of the volume, it has only grown 6% this year. I think that last year was +23. nevertheless, considering that you're already in 19 countries, it should have grown much faster than this. Could you please talk us on what's kind of real issues there, and then what are the plans to overcome that to make sure that there's a strong kind of recyclability happen?
Yeah, thanks, Brijesh. You're quite right. We've expanded to 19 countries. Recycle volume increased by 6%. What you have to remember is that when we start offering these new services in new countries, then circularity can be still relatively immature in those countries. Just to give you one example, landfill prices, which is a key driver for making our service attractive. If those landfill prices are still relatively low in some of the countries, and that will be the case in Romania, for example, then it's very difficult to persuade contractors and other stakeholders within the building industry to use our service because it's much cheaper for them to get rid of the waste and send it to landfill.
What's important here is that, in parallel with us expanding, the number of countries where we offer this service, we're also active in trying to get more proactive regulations in place, both at the EU level, but also at the member state level to drive this. We've made it very clear to policymakers, if we're serious about circularity, there needs to be clear financial incentives. That doesn't stop us from offering these services. We want to send a clear signal to the market that we can take back this material. We want to take this material, but we need to have more conducive regulations in place in order to drive this. We can see for sure that things are changing.
Germany, for example, is introducing new legislation in 2024, where recyclable products cannot be sent to landfill. We thoroughly support that. We're seeing that move in other countries as well. The EU, of course, is very serious about driving the circularity agenda. This will change over time. It can take a while before the volumes pick up in certain countries.
Understood. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Jen.
Thank you. Our last question will come from Zaim Beekawa with JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Zaim Beekawa, please go ahead.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you, Zaim.
Great. Thank you for taking my question. Just a quick one to do with the sustainability CapEx. I just wanted to sort of understand whether the full burden of that falls on you or similar to kind of the cement industry, could you actually apply for grants and receive that from the government given the benefits from that?
Yeah, I can start and Anthony can maybe add a bit. Yes, you can, not in every place, receive a grant, but in many places you can. Obviously that we factor that in. We try to kind of do it in the order of. Sometimes the grant can be quite big, actually. Anthony, I'm sure you have some examples. So we try to do it in the order of, and it's not the one more important than the other, but the fundamental is we want to do it in a place where we know we're going to continue to produce, and we want to do it in a place where we can get the electricity, and it's green, and it's reasonably affordable. Then when we have done that, then we go in and try to apply for grants.
We have had varying success on that. Sometimes we have received quite healthy grants and sometimes zero. I would think There are quite a few EU countries where you can receive considerable grants. Of course, the other aspect is you might not get the grant, but you could very often get a tax allowance and tax benefits, and that might not show up in the CapEx, but you see it further down in the net income. That you would almost always find a way to get something of that. Over to you. Are you fine, Anthony, or?
I mean, one example of where we did get a grant that was in Norway with the Moss electric melter. Was it 10 million, 10 million EUR? That was a collaboration project with Enova. That was because it was a pilot project. It was the first time that we were building such a large electric melter, the largest in the sector. That's why we were able to get that funding. As Jens says, it depends case by case, country to country. There will be different opportunities and of course, we're looking at those opportunities every time we're making decisions to convert.
Thanks. Very clear.
Thank you. At this time, we have no further questions in queue. I'll turn the call back over to our host for any additional or closing remarks.
Thank you. Jens, Kim, Anthony, and I thank you for joining today's ESG investor call. We would like to thank you for all your good questions and the audience for listening in on today's call. We appreciate your interest in ROCKWOOL A/S. If you have further questions, please reach out to me, Thomas, or Anthony. You know our contact details, or you may find them in the investor section on our corporate website. Have a great day.