Environmental Protection
WACKER attaches particular importance to integrated environmental protection, which begins right in the product-development and plant-planning stage. WACKER constantly strives to improve its production processes in order 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.
Our environmental protection measures often surpass statutory requirements – in the spirit of the central idea behind the Responsible Care® initiative. 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. We register all our incidents across the Group in a timely manner in our sustainability-reporting IT system (SPIRIT) and assess them in terms of their environmental relevance. Just one incident assessed as environmentally relevant occurred in the reporting year, even though it involved neither a hazard nor damage. There were no environment-related compliance cases in 2023. Nor were there any incidents involving considerable fines or penalties (more than €10,000) or any non-monetary fines due to non-compliance with environment-related legislation.
Through a groupwide reporting system, our Group Coordinator for the Environment reviews how environmental standards and legal requirements are put into practice.
By setting quantifiable environmental targets, we aim to lower the environmental impact of our production activities. We have set ourselves targets with respect to reducing CO2 emissions and specific energy and water consumption.
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€ million |
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2023 |
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2022 |
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2021 |
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Operating costs |
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98.2 |
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88.9 |
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81.5 |
Capital expenditures |
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24.0 |
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8.8 |
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1.9 |
Areas covered by our investments in environmental protection include water-pollution control, waste management, emissions control, climate change mitigation, noise reduction, soil remediation and preservation of the natural landscape. A large portion of the capital expenditures on environmental protection went toward WACKER’s central disposal facilities at the Burghausen site.
As part of our sustainability strategy, a special budget was introduced in 2022 with the aim of bringing sustainability projects to fruition quickly. Around € 7.5 million of that budget was invested in the reporting year in projects with a positive impact on reaching our environmental targets.
To motivate our employees, we presented the WACKER Net Zero Award for the first time in 2022. This € 10,000 prize is awarded annually and recognizes outstanding projects that reduce WACKER’s product environmental footprint.
