Our commitment to protecting the environment inspires us to continue pursuing innovative product designs. We focus on product enhancements that help customers meet their sustainability goals, including conserving water, supporting human health and hygiene and selecting responsibly manufactured products that make extensive use of recycled materials to reduce waste.
This achieved our 2021 goal to increase revenue from products with sustainable attributes to 75% by 2024. We define products with sustainable attributes based on the European Union’s Taxonomy Regulation, which provides a classification system for sustainable activities and can be used as guidance for defining products with sustainable attributes.
For Zurn Elkay’s products to be considered sustainable, they must contribute to at least one of the EU Taxonomy's six environmental objectives, do no significant harm to the environment and respect basic human rights and labor standards.
The EU Taxonomy's environmental objective of the sustainable use and protection of water and marine resources (3) is directly applicable to Zurn Elkay’s water management products. Likewise, Zurn Elkay products that support climate change mitigation (i.e., energy-efficient products that reduce GHG emissions) and products that support climate change adaptation (i.e., technological products for managing water usage) meet each of the six environmental objectives. Additionally, products with high recycled material content support the environmental objective of the protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems (6).
This spending will help us advance our development of clean tech products and increase our innovation capacity, which is part of our strategic planning and initiatives.
As a pure-play water company, we focus our clean technologies program on development of sustainable water solutions, including water infrastructure and distribution products, water safety and flow control for pollution prevention, water treatment and purification, and hygienic and environmental pollution controls to ensure water quality and safety. Our clean tech line includes the Zurn Smart connected products suite, which provides for remote monitoring and rapid response to issues, facilitating efficiency and safety. We develop our clean tech products specifically to meet or exceed Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design (LEED) green building requirements for green-certified properties.
To help us achieve our goal of offering products with sustainable attributes, we design new products based on our commitment to sustainability, aligned with global water conservation standards. Assessing the environmental impact of new products is a key step in our product development process. We also incorporate feedback and input from customers directly into our product designs. As part of our overall commitments, we are a partner in the Environmental Protection Agency’s WaterSense program.
While sustainability is a top priority in our product development, we remain committed to upholding the highest quality standards to deliver customer satisfaction. All Zurn Elkay business units operate under quality management systems to consistently provide products and services that meet all applicable customer, statutory and regulatory requirements. As part of the Zurn Elkay Business System (ZEBS), the quality management system includes a feedback loop to support continuous improvement, prevent nonconformity and monitor product performance, all to ensure both product safety and associate safety.