Since 2004, WACKER has been using a system to assess its sites’ environmental performance. We use it to convert a site’s total emissions and energy consumption into environmental units. These units also include water consumption and waste.

Taking both absolute quantities and so-called weighting factors into consideration, the assessment takes account of four criteria:

• Environmental impact
• Safety of treatment/disposal
• Requirements imposed by environmental legislation and corporate policy
• Public acceptance

Energy consumption (power/heat consumption) is thus very important to WACKER due to public awareness of the significance of greenhouse gases and international climate-protection agreements.

Since we acquired the Holla silicon-metal plant in Norway in 2010, we record the environmental units for our chemical and metallurgical production sites separately. One reason for this is that Holla’s emissions are different to those of chemical production plants, for example for sulfur oxides (SO_x).

Emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases are largely energy-related at WACKER. The number of environmental units remained virtually unchanged. Nevertheless, we made advances in 2011/2012 based on production volumes.