Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility

ITC strives to offer the ceramic industry and society sustainability, innovation, competitiveness and social commitment. Aware of the need to adapt to new environmental demands, ITC has restructured its organisation and management chart to respond more effectively and efficiently to the existing and latent demands of its various stakeholders.

Thus, in its commitment to excellence, ITC has incorporated into its corporate culture and business strategy a series of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) actions that address three spheres of action: social, environmental, and economic.

ITC's commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility has materialised in an active, voluntary contribution to social, economic, and environmental improvement in relation to its workers, suppliers, business customers, students, business associations, professionals from the ceramic sector, universities and other research centres, society, mass media, ceramic sector companies and all individuals ITC relates to as a result of its activity.

This commitment, driven and backed by ITC management, has been embodied since 2006 by the acquisition and implementation of a series of new management systems and tools that allow ITC to balance its economic, social, and environmental areas.

ITC's raison d'être has always been sustainability, this being understood as the ability to detect needs or problems in ceramic companies and to create mechanisms to resolve or respond to these, ITC's spirit of cooperation with all its stakeholders being particularly noteworthy.

ITC focuses its social commitment on improving the quality of employee work life, reconciling work life and life outside work, promoting and fostering worker training, professional and vocational insertion of disadvantaged or disabled groups, protection of the environment, efficient and sustainable research, and marketing focused on development of responsible commercialisation linked to business ethics.

The Institute of Ceramic Technology (ITC) has entered into an undertaking with society and the environment to integrate protection and respect for the environment into ITC overall management and strategy.

Since 2006, using environmental management systems as a reference, ITC management has implemented working methods focusing on sustainable development, addressing all environmental aspects of ITC activities, as well as the impacts they generate in their surroundings, with the firm decision to minimise such impacts by using the necessary means and resources, promoting a culture of efficient use of natural resources and appropriate waste treatment.

In addition, ITC meets the legal requirements directly incumbent upon it and all such that it has voluntarily entered into regarding the environment. The ongoing improvement of Environmental Management entails the establishment and revision by ITC of the objectives that lay the groundwork for perfecting the System.

These objectives are embodied in specific measurable goals and are appropriately planned and assessed. In short, ITC drives collaboration in R&D&I projects that foster sustainable development of the environment, with companies and public entities, of efficient and sustainable research and, in general, of all its stakeholders, including clients, suppliers and own personnel.

ITC has stood out for its enterprising spirit, adapting to new social demands and changes in the economic context; all this, however, without relinquishing the spirit of providing services adapted to the changing socio-economic and political environment, and developing and implementing a series of internal as well as external policies.

ITC has therefore developed and implemented a Social Policy, whose basic objective is to improve the quality of life and the relationships with its personnel in the workplace, as well as with its target public and stakeholders. Thus, ITC facilitates reconciling work and private and family life of its employees, seeking to improve the workplace atmosphere through regular internal surveys in which these conditions can be measured, in addition to addressing measures to integrate disadvantaged groups. ITC also takes into account the views of its member companies and client businesses, there being mechanisms for all to express their complaints, views, and suggestions.

Through its Human Resources Department, ITC developed an Equality Plan for Women and Men, which is being updated and governs interpersonal activity at ITC.

On the other hand, an Economic Policy has been developed to define quality productivity and profitability objectives, on both an economic and non-economic scale, performing activity management with advanced criteria and mechanisms that enable results and their evolution to be analysed. Long-term strategic planning requires generating analysis and measurement habits in macrosocial and macroeconomic, as well as in micro-sector contexts. This involves essential strengthening for collaboration with entities in the social economy found in the associative fabric of its sector by multiple inter-business cooperation actions.

The Institute of Ceramic Technology (ITC-AICE) has in its DNA the promotion of actions and initiatives to achieve real equality within our organisation at 360º, covering all areas and in all the activities we carry out.

One of them, of vital importance, is the application of the III Plan for Equality between Women and Men, approved on 28/10/2021 internally and having worked with the Equality Momentum Consultancy.