Controlling Instruments

Wacker Chemie AG - Sustainability Report 2015/16

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.

We use the WACKER® Eco Assessment Tool to systematically evaluate 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.

Measuring the Group’s corporate carbon footprint is an important tool for improving climate protection. That’s why we determine not only our direct greenhouse gas emissions (as per Scope 1) and indirect emissions from bought-in energy (Scope 2), but also our Scope 3 emissions. These include emissions generated along the supply chain, e.g. by suppliers or through waste disposal and the transportation of products. In 2015, we added another Scope 3 category and further refined our calculation methodology. In the period under review, we forwarded these emissions data to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

In 2015, groupwide implementation of our new IT system for sustainability reporting (SPIRIT) was completed, thereby replacing various individual systems. We use this software to record environmental and safety-related events, for example, and to manage internal and external Integrated Management System (IMS) audits.

Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol
The GHG Protocol is an internationally recognized instrument for quantifying and controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The standards outlined in the GHG Protocol have been jointly developed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) since 1998. The GHG Protocol specifies how an organization should calculate its greenhouse gas emissions and how emission-reducing programs should be conducted.