Production and Safety

WACKER attaches particular importance to integrated environmental protection. This commences with product development and plant planning. WACKER continuously works on improving its production processes to conserve resources. A key task is to close material loops and recycle byproducts from other areas back into production. This enables us to reduce or prevent energy and resource consumption, emissions and waste, and to integrate environmental protection into our production processes. At WACKER, we monitor resource and waste targets at site and divisional levels.

In accordance with the core ideas of the Responsible Care^® initiative, our environmental protection measures often go beyond what is legally required.

Responsible stewardship is one of the ways we contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In production, we focus on SDG 12 “Sustainable Consumption,” SDG 13 “Climate Action” and SDG 17 “Partnerships for the Goals,” for example.

Our groupwide standards for protecting the environment apply to all our production sites and technical competence centers. The site managers ensure that environmental protection requirements and environmental standards are met at their particular locations. The Group Coordinator for the Environment looks at how sites implement environmental standards in practice and performs random checks to verify legal compliance.

Our sites regularly inform the public about our environmental-protection activities, including annual community meetings at Nünchritz (Germany), as well as similar events with neighbors or “open houses” at Adrian (Michigan, USA) and Nanjing and Zhangjiagang in China. Our Burghausen and Nünchritz sites publish environmental reports (available in German only) containing environmental-protection facts and figures. In September 2018, we invited the public to open houses at our Burghausen and Nünchritz production sites and our central R&D facilities in Munich.

Our Burghausen and Nünchritz sites provide the public with information in the form of annual environmental and emission reports (available in German only):

WACKER has been a member of the Bavarian Environmental Pact (website available in German only) since it was founded in 1995. Since 2015, this Pact has been operating under the slogan “Jointly strengthening the environment and the economy.” The Pact serves as a catalyst to promote an environmental partnership focusing on climate protection and energy conservation, raw-material efficiency and environmental technology, biodiversity, and environment-based management. Its primary aims are to strengthen companies’ individual responsibility and avoid environmental pollution.

In 2018, Saxony’s Environmental Alliance (website available in German only) recognized our Nünchritz site as one of the initiative’s key partners with a certification valid until 2021. WACKER joined the Saxony-based partnership in 2000. It now has 150 member companies. For two decades, the partnership between Saxony’s government, business, agriculture and forestry has championed innovative ways of taking responsibility for natural resources. Joining the organization means a voluntary commitment to verifying various certifications such as for the Integrated Management System and energy management system. The Environmental Alliance’s advisory board sets out focus topics and targets in areas such as waste and CO₂ reduction.

Emission

Substance outputs, noise, vibrations, light, heat or radiation emitted into the environment by an industrial plant.

Biodiversity

In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development passed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This convention addresses the preservation of biological diversity (genes, species and habitats), the sustainable exploitation of such diversity, as well as access rules to, and the sharing of benefits from, genetic resources (access and benefit sharing). So far, the CBD has been signed by 168 countries and the EU (with Germany becoming a signatory in 1993). In May 2011, the EU Commission published a biodiversity strategy to 2020.