Production and Safety
WACKER attaches particular importance to integrated environmental protection, even when developing products and planning our plants. As we move toward a circular economy, WACKER constantly strives to improve its production processes in order to conserve resources. One of our main tasks 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 (German-language version only), 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 production sites and technical competence centers. The site managers ensure that environmental protection requirements and environmental standards are met at their particular locations. Through a groupwide reporting system, our Group Coordinator for the Environment reviews how environmental standards and legal requirements are put into practice.
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 in Adrian, Michigan (USA) and Nanjing and Zhangjiagang (China). At the Burghausen site, we have established the WACKER Knowledge Forum as a series of public events. No in-person events were held during the coronavirus pandemic to protect visitors. Videos of the WACKER Knowledge Forum (available in German only) are available on our website. The events shown there were held prior to the pandemic.
Our Burghausen and Nünchritz sites provide the public with information in the form of annual environmental and emission reports (available in German only):
- Environmental Report Burghausen 2019
- Emissions Report Burghausen 2019
- Environmental Report Burghausen 2020
- Emissions Report Burghausen 2020
- Environmental and Emissions Report Nünchritz 2019
- Environmental and Emissions Report Nünchritz 2020
WACKER is a founding member of the Bavarian Environmental Pact. After a quarter century of working together to protect the environment, the Bavarian State Government and industrial associations have expanded this agreement into an environmental and climate pact (German-language website only).
Since 2000, WACKER’s Nünchritz site has participated in Saxony’s Environment Alliance (German-language website only), an initiative run by the German state of Saxony with some 250 participating companies and currently extended through 2021.