The Financial Times and IFC announced the winners of the 2007 FT Sustainable Banking Awards on June 7 in London. Over 100 renowned financial institutions from 50 countries worldwide, including ABN AMRO, HSBC, JP Morgan, competed for awards covering 5 categories. Industrial Bank was nominated for Emerging Markets Sustainable Bank of the Year & Sustainable Deal of the Year and achieved runner-up in the Sustainable Deal of the Year category, becoming the first and sole Chinese financial institution to receive the award.
Sustainable Banking Awards, the leading global awards program was created by the Financial Times in association with IFC in 2006, covering 5 categories: Sustainable Bank of the Year, Emerging Markets Sustainable Bank of the Year, Chairman's Award, Sustainable Deal of the Year, and Achievement in Carbon Finance. The program was designed to recognize banks that have shown leadership and innovation in integrating social, environmental and corporate governance objectives into their operations. This year, Industrial Bank was granted the Sustainable Deal of the Year for its financing of energy-efficiency projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It was said that from June 2005, Industrial Bank had initiated financing product, the Energy-efficiency Loan, for its energy-efficiency projects, which especially targeting enterprises advocating environmental protection & energy efficiency, developing and adopting new energy sources.
The projects covered energy-saving items facing primary energy as coal, petroleum, natural gas, and secondary energy as electric power, steam, as well as the developing and utilizing items involving new energy as wind sources, solar energy, marsh gas, biomass energy, and water & ground source heat bump; covered reconstruction programs aiming old equipments and technic, such as alteration for boiler & frequency control of cooling fan's water bump, as well as newly launched items as recycled residual heat power, new energy-efficiency production line, and new heat-power-cool co-generation power plant.
Besides energy saving, the above items create accessional benefits including improvement of production & product quality, reduction of raw material consumption, fall of reject rate, and have prominent environmental effects on reducing the emission and discharge of green house gas as carbon dioxide, harmful gas as sulfur dioxide, sewage and atmospheric suspended particulate.
Up to the present, Industrial Bank has offered energy-efficiency loan of RMB 130 million for 10 items across the country, equaling to reducing almost 2-million-ton carbon dioxide emission in China.