Alois Omlor GmbH

Alois Omlor GmbH is a medium-sized family business with over 350 employees. Its services and core competences include the production of building materials, the building materials trade, the provision of complex logistics services and the recycling and landfilling of bulk materials.

The family-owned company attaches particular importance to sustainable management and strategic orientation. In this context, long-term relationships with customers, suppliers and partner companies are cornerstones of the corporate philosophy. The success of this philosophy is reflected in the continuous upward and further development of the company for over 80 years now. The Managing Director, Dipl.-Kfm. Helmut Omlor, has successfully managed the company over the past decades and developed it into a modern trading and service company through continuous modernisation measures and careful but steady growth. For some years now, the third generation of the family, Dr Christoph Kopper - responsible for legal matters, management of the gravel pits and supra-regional waste disposal - and Dipl.-Kfm. Michael Kopper - responsible for general administration - have also been working for the company, so that the continuation and development of the company is guaranteed for decades to come.

As a producer of sands and gravels, the company has a responsibility to operate extraction sites in a way that protects groundwater and to leave them in a recultivated and renaturalised state after the end of extraction. In particular, the extraction sites on the Rhine, where the gravel is extracted under water, are subject to strict regulations regarding the handling of groundwater and the measures to be taken with the excavation lake created after extraction. As a rule, once gravel extraction is complete, the quarry ponds become a mixture of bathing and fishing lakes as well as biotopes that provide new habitats for many animals and plant species. As the extraction areas were generally used for agriculture before gravel extraction, a natural area is created as a result of gravel extraction that is more valuable - in terms of a greater diversity of flora and fauna - than the area before extraction could offer.

In order to integrate the protection of biodiversity even more strongly into sustainable management in the future, a specialised field biologist was commissioned at the beginning of 2020 to develop and establish a permanent biotope and species protection management system. The aim is to develop biodiversity as early as the extraction phase and integrate it into everyday work processes. The situation is permanently monitored in order to be able to react quickly and flexibly to changes and to achieve the greatest possible benefit for the biodiversity of the operating areas in line with operational requirements.

As different ecological conditions prevail at the different locations, specially adapted concepts are to be developed in each case. On the one hand, the aim is to protect and optimise the living conditions for the characteristic species present and, on the other, to create opportunities for independent colonisation by endangered species with similar biotope requirements. To this end, the existing ecological potentials are analysed and deficiencies in the habitat equipment are recorded with a deficit analysis, which can be eliminated in a deficit compensation. The approach has already yielded initial successes in just a few months and is to be further developed and refined in the future.

The family business has traditionally placed great importance on sustainability and is aware of its responsibility to protect biodiversity. The company's own quarrying areas offer unique opportunities for this. For this reason, the company management has decided in favour of permanent in-house biotope and species protection management, thus going far beyond the legal requirements.

In order to achieve better networking with companies with a similar approach, joining the Biodiversity in Good Company initiative, an organisation that stands for the protection of biodiversity in an economic context like no other, was an obvious choice.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)