Waste

In integrated production, we minimize waste by feeding byproducts back into the production loop. WACKER endeavors to avoid waste throughout a product’s entire life cycle. Groupwide, we record the volume of waste we generate according to the criteria “to be recycled” and “to be disposed of,” as well as “hazardous” and “non-hazardous.”

With regard to waste, we prioritize prevention over recycling over disposal. We see it as one of our ongoing tasks to identify new ways of suitable material recycling within and outside our sites. The Nünchritz site has achieved a recycling rate of over 97 percent since 2010.

It is very important to us that waste is recycled, treated and disposed of in an environmentally compatible and legally compliant manner. To this end, we monitor the disposal companies that we work with for recycling and disposal with regular audits and assess them according to four criteria:

• Quantity of disposed materials
• Company size of the service provider
• Potential of disposed materials to cause environmental damage
• Disposal costs

We complete systematic checklists for our reports when we visit disposal agents. Our German sites can exchange information about external disposal companies via our internal Environmental Information System (EIS).

At the Burghausen site, we started up a plant in 2015 to recover 2,400 metric tons per annum of ethylene – previously disposed of in the waste-gas incinerator – and utilize it for VAM production at WACKER POLYMERS. In the same year, we recorded waste at the Burghausen site that was not generated during production, but rather during construction and investment activities, e.g. rubble, scrap steel and paper. Groupwide, waste volumes fell by around 3 percent in 2015; this trend continued in 2016.

We maintain a chemicals-exchange database. Burghausen site employees can use it to identify surplus substances, either in opened packaging drums, or in their original container. The database is a practical way to coordinate the recycling of surplus materials. For larger material volumes, our business divisions can avail of an online portal to advertise unused materials groupwide to avoid disposal.

In the reporting period, WACKER India in Mumbai dedicated special campaigns to World Environment Day, where employees addressed waste-reduction topics, among others.

Reusable Packaging

WACKER is keen to minimize the environmental impact of its packaging materials. For instance, Siltronic AG prefers reusable packaging such as the Hybox. We ship our 300 mm wafers in this type of reusable container, which is designed for transportation in hygienically sensitive areas. The Hybox has 30 percent less volume than cardboard packaging. Since the introduction of the Hybox in 2006, we have shipped 74,000 of them and, thanks to this reusable design, we have avoided a total of around 3,700 metric tons of waste.

The Siltronic sites use a recycling process for cutting slurry. Cutting slurry is added in the wire-sawing of wafers and consists of a cutting fluid and silicon carbide as the cutting material. For recycling purposes, we collect used cutting slurry for external recovery companies that separate liquid and solids. The recycling companies recover 85 to 100 percent of our cutting fluid, which is then used in production again. Recycling rates of up to 75 percent have been achieved for silicon carbide. Any solids that cannot be used find application as blast furnace aggregates in steel smelting, for example.