At WACKER, twenty-one groupwide regulations govern topics of overall significance for the company. They concern management, organization and collaboration, law and compliance, strategy and business processes as well as financing, controlling, accounting and taxes. Numerous other controlled documents regulate processes for environmental and health protection, plant and workplace safety, and product safety, on a Group, regional and site-specific level.

All our processes are designed to keep customers satisfied, meet our obligations to society, and to secure WACKER’s competitiveness. Each of our sites achieves these goals in different ways. At Siltronic’s Portland site (Oregon, USA), a very effective “Quality and Value Improvement System” uses a wide range of control mechanisms – such as balanced scorecards, and systems for developing, prioritizing and tracking action plans. So that employees can view action plans and success rates at any time, Portland publishes them in a database and on a bulletin board.

Since 2012, we have been using the WACKER^® Eco Assessment Tool to evaluate systematically the risks and opportunities of our product line from an environmental perspective. We take account of material, water and energy consumption, as well as ecotoxicity, over the entire product life cycle.

The Group’s corporate carbon footprint report is an important tool for improving climate protection. That’s why we have been determining not only our direct greenhouse gas emissions (as per Greenhouse Gas Protocol Scope 1) and indirect emissions from bought-in energy (Scope 2), but also our Scope 3 emissions since 2012. These include emissions generated along the supply chain, e.g. by suppliers or through waste disposal and the transportation of products. In 2014, we added further Scope 3 categories and adapted our calculation methodology to the GHG Protocol guidance for the chemical industry. In the period under review, we forwarded these emissions data to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Founded in 2000, CDP is a non-profit organization working to achieve greater transparency in greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2013, our new IT system for sustainability reporting (SPIRIT) was implemented groupwide, replacing the various individual systems. We use the new software to collect and manage environmental and energy data, environment- and safety-related incidents, and Integrated Management System (IMS) inspections and audits. In 2014, we benefited from the use of this instrument at all our large production sites. It has replaced almost 70 percent of our former systems.