Environment

Climate change is one of the major challenges facing us in the 21st century. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in 2015, 195 of the world's nations adopted the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C. We, too, are doing our part to help stem climate change because we believe that climate protection and energy efficiency will pay off in the long run - for both the environment and our business.  

Our climate actions:

• Minimizing our process emissions, executing energy efficiency measures and purchasing more electricity from renewable sources are key elements in our climate mitigation efforts. To keep the greenhouse gases arising from the transportation of our products as low as possible, we ship our goods by boat rather than plane, when feasible.
• Our Supplier Decarbonization Program is another key element contributing to reduce our emissions. Through the program, we aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with purchased goods and services as well as capital goods.
• We joined the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and are thus meeting the requirements of the Paris Agreement. SBTi confirmed that our climate targets correspond to the current status of climate science. 

Read more in our Sustainability Report
   

When it comes to waste, we firmly believe in prevention, recovery and recycling. We attempt to prevent waste by developing new production processes and optimizing existing ones. However, it is not (yet) possible to avoid waste altogether, so we diligently separate the trash that we do generate. This allows valuable raw materials to be recovered and transformed into new products, thereby supporting a circular economy. We discard the unrecyclable waste in an environmentally sustainable manner in line with the strictest waste disposal standards. To track the amount of waste we produce, we have developed a Waste Score, an indicator that helps us identify the areas where we can accelerate our waste reduction efforts or step up material recycling and recovery.  

With water scarcity affecting more and more regions worldwide, responsible water management is of key importance to us, especially as we too depend on water to manufacture our products.

Our wastewater may contain traces of substances such as heavy metals or active pharmaceutical ingredients, making it our responsibility to minimize the impact of our wastewater across all our sites. To us, sustainable water stewardship means not harming the aquatic ecosystems from which we obtain freshwater, or into which we discharge treated wastewater. We strictly adhere to government regulations and even go beyond: By 2030, we plan to reduce potentially harmful residues in our wastewater to below the no-effect threshold, a scientifically defined limit below which no negative environmental impacts are to be expected.

To boost our water efficiency, we defined a Water Intensity Score. The score relates the amount of water withdrawn at a given site to the number of hours worked, while taking the local availability of water into account.