Sustainable Product Strategy
ALTANA offers companies around the world specialty chemi-
cals solutions that make products used in daily life better
and more sustainable. We convince our customers with add-
ed value and give them a competitive edge through our
work. Some solutions improve, for example, the functions of
end products and increase their lifetime. Others optimize
our customers’ value chain in terms of energy and resource
consumption. And still others enable our customers to
reduce the amount of critical substances in their end prod-
ucts or to replace them with less critical ones. Innovative,
environmentally friendly, safely processable products play a
key role. They help ALTANA’s customers implement their
own sustainability concepts. Based on this understanding
of sustainability, the Group continuously leverages new
fields of business and paves the way for further profitable
growth.
Due to their strong customer orientation, many
ALTANA companies gear their innovation strategies system-
atically to a catalog of sustainability criteria at a very early
stage of product development. This includes responsible hand-
ling of resources (water, energy, and raw materials) as well
as the goal of developing products whose effects on the environment
are as low as possible without detracting from
the product’s function. This is reflected by the increasing num-
ber of coatings, additives, and pigment formulations that
are conceived for water-based applications and therefore do
not contain organic solvents.
Another aim of ALTANA’s product strategy is to replace
critical components with less critical ones whenever pos-
sible. For products that need classifications due to national
or international hazardous substance regulations, ALTANA’s
companies have special data sheets on hand that provide con-
sumers with important information on safe storage and
further processing. Moreover, certified lifecycle analyses are
available for certain products.
The Keep Changing Agenda from 2016 will support
the ALTANA Group’s sustainability strategy in the future,
among other things. A central action field of the future agen-
da is “Take the lead in sustainability.” To achieve this goal,
new criteria were defined in 2017 in purchasing and research
and development; in the initiative to improve corporate
processes, called ALTANA Excellence; in M&A; and related to
investment. In addition to economic aspects, these ALTANA
projects address ecological and social topics. For example,
planned product innovations are analyzed early on within
the framework of the stage-gate process, a model for inno-
vation and product development, taking into account pos-
sible environmental effects.
Also, ALTANA is working on establishing ongoing ex-
change between research and development experts with-
in the Group and the Environment, Health & Safety depart-
ment (EH&S) on the issue of sustainability. Joint regional
and global workshops and special Intranet platforms are the
basis of this exchange.
In addition, the companies in the ALTANA Group are
invited to propose projects with high environmental relevance.
From more than 25 ideas, ALTANA selects the most impor-
tant ones and treats them as so-called “sustainability light-
house projects” with a high priority.
Pigments for Food Contact
More and more food packaging is printed using ink that
contains metallic-effect pigments. This packaging has to com-
ply with the specifications of the packaging and food in-
dustry and the EU regarding consumer and health protection.
Therefore, ECKART set up a special production facility at
78 Products