Actions
Pollution prevention and reduction
Compliance with all legislation at national and local level constitutes the basis for WACKER’s actions to keep emissions to air and water as low as possible. Furthermore, environmental protection is regulated throughout the Group by WACKER standards containing specific requirements relating to emissions for all production sites and technical competence centers.
Central responsibility for our environmental management system lies with the Group Coordinator for the Environment.
Each site has an obligation to organize environmental protection locally to ensure compliance with environmental regulations, the safe operation of plants and to carry out environmental monitoring. A standardized environmental management system enables us to record our emissions to air and water at all our sites and to ensure that legal conditions, emission limits and WACKER’s environmental standards are complied with.
As part of an ABC analysis that every site must carry out once a year, we analyze and assess material environmental aspects including relevant site emissions. Site-specific targets are established if necessary.
Equally, specific training of our production employees in environmental protection is an important measure to guarantee plant operation that ensures legal certainty and to avoid severe environmental incidents with regard to emissions to air and water.
Nevertheless, an unintended release of emissions impacting the health of people and the environment might occur. All groupwide incidents are recorded in a timely manner in our environmental data management system and assessed in terms of their environmental relevance.
Product safety
Manufacturing specialty chemical products often requires the use of critical substances. All our measures are designed to guarantee the safety of our products and fulfill legal requirements. For the purpose of Responsible Care®, we often go beyond the purely legal framework.
To ensure that any adverse impacts relating to critical substances when using our products correctly are minimized, we consider the health and environmental risks along the entire product lifecycle – from research and development through manufacturing to application and disposal.
We continually assess the (potentially hazardous) properties of all WACKER products, which involves checking and assessing their physicochemical, health-related and environmentally relevant properties. Our labeling in safety data sheets and on product labels inform our customers about the safe use of our products, especially for critical ingredients.
Only some 50 percent of WACKER products require a material safety data sheet (MSDS) by law. We go beyond this requirement and produce material safety data sheets for all our sales products, not only those with hazardous materials classification.
We continuously work on minimizing critical substances in products. We keep a list of substances that are to be avoided in WACKER products as a guide for product developers. In addition to prohibited or restricted chemicals (e.g. substances in Annexes XIV and XVII of the European REACH legislation for chemicals), these are substances that are no longer desired by many companies as well as substances listed by the European Chemicals Agency in its candidate list of substances of very high concern (SVHCs).
To support the sustainability assessment of our products, we use the Identifying Substances and Mixtures of Concern (ISC) database system for systematic assessment of the raw materials we use. This enables the WACKER product portfolio to be assessed and improved in terms of health, environmental compatibility and the avoidance of potential risks (e.g. SVHCs). WACKER also monitors chemical policy debates to be able to take future developments into account early on in the product development phase and to optimize ingredients.
REACH
The REACH regulation, which came into force in 2007, governs the registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals within the European Union.
Since the REACH registration process began in 2008, WACKER has submitted many revised registration dossiers to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). For many of the dossiers, the ECHA imposes additional requirements in the course of its regular assessments, all of which we fulfilled on time in 2024, just as we had done in previous years.
WACKER is in close contact with its suppliers of chemical substances. We refer to our data when verifying the registration status and, where necessary, request information to ensure that we use only REACH-compliant raw materials.
Within Europe, companies that market hazardous substances have had to supply the European reporting system with extensive information for the EU’s poison control centers since January 2021. WACKER has set up an automatic notification tool and registered notifications to ECHA’s PCN (Poison Centre Notification) portal.
Plant safety
It is important to us that WACKER strives to continuously operate its plants and processes in a way that does not jeopardize people and the environment by releasing emissions and critical substances into the air and water.
We operate a groupwide process safety management system that covers occupational safety, plant safety and crisis management. Our process safety management in the year under review continued to focus on prevention.
Nevertheless, safety-critical incidents cannot be avoided completely. If a loss event occurs, emergency response plans govern cooperation between internal and external task forces and the authorities at every WACKER site.
To be able to guarantee the safety of our plants in the long term, we first identify and assess hazards systematically and review them on a regular basis. We analyze the energy generated in our processes (e.g. pressure, heat) and the influence that any individual errors may have on an incident chain through to incidents or accidents. We then define protective measures according to our analysis findings in order to avoid any unwanted incidents.
We record all health- and safety-related and environmentally relevant incidents in good time in our groupwide environmental-data management system and assess them. Systematically working through incidents and establishing relevant actions is intended to avoid similar incidents going forward. We use incident notifications highlighting inter-departmental or cross-site learning positives to brief our corporate units with similar hazard potential and, where applicable, introduce any improvement measures. The Group Coordinator for Safety is responsible for monitoring throughout the Group.
As part of our Safety Culture@WACKER initiative, which we launched in the year under review, we work on raising safety awareness among all our employees, thus increasing the level of occupational and process safety in the long term.
Transport safety
WACKER continuously works to ensure that it is transporting its products safely. This is especially the case when it comes to dangerous goods and critical substances.
All sites at which WACKER operates production facilities and from which it ships goods must adhere to local and international transportation regulations as well as WACKER’s high safety standards. An essential aspect of transport safety relates to our personnel, who are well trained both in handling dangerous goods and securing loads.
We also have high safety expectations of our logistics service providers; such expectations are laid down in contractual agreements with them and in a comprehensive requirements profile alongside the legislation that they must comply with. If a contractual partner deviates from our requirements, we issue complaints and require corrective action to ensure a continuous improvement process.
For products with high hazard potential, we use packaging and tanks that meet the highest quality standards. In the period under review, no reportable transport incidents involving dangerous goods were recorded.
In monitoring distribution of our products, we also record transport incidents not involving dangerous goods and any that do not have a negative impact on people and the environment. These incidents are used as a key criterion in our annual assessment of our logistics service providers.
Upstream value chain
We address the upstream value chain in our environmental provisions governing emissions and critical substances; we have anchored these provisions in our general terms and conditions and our Supplier Code of Conduct. Further details can be found under ESRS 2 – General Disclosures.
