Sustainability is extremely important to ALTANA. We view it as a combination of economic efficiency, environmental and health protection, and corporate social responsibility. We document our progress in our annual Sustainability Report, which can be downloaded or ordered at www.altana.com/ sustainability. A compact overview is provided on the pages to follow. The basis of our actions is the internationally valid voluntary initiative of the chemical industry called Responsible Care. All of the Group’s managing directors personally signed it. ALTANA is a member of the United Nations Global Com- pact initiative, which some 13,000 companies and organi- zations from 170 countries have joined. In Germany, we sup- port the sustainability initiative “Chemie ³,” which was called into being by the German Chemical Industry Association (VCI), the German Mining, Chemical and Energy Industrial Union (IG BCE), and the German Federation of Chemical Employers (BAVC). Environmental Protection We deal with resources responsibly. In doing so, we pursue three objectives. First, we make a concerted effort to use raw materials, water, and energy as sustainably as possible in production. Second, we try to reduce emissions wherever possible, particularly carbon-dioxide (CO²) and volatile organ- ic compounds (VOC). Third, we are steadily improving our production and production yields to minimize the amount of waste and wastewater. We made further progress in all three areas in 2015. Certified management systems are the main instrument we use to control and guide our resource consumption. Each site is required to become certified according to the internationally valid environmental management system ISO 14001. ALTANA has nearly completed this procedure. Only a few sites acquired recently are still in the process of becoming certified. In addition, all of our German sites either already have introduced a certified management system or are in the process of doing so. The holding company in Wesel successfully completed its energy audit last year. In the year under review, we had the various sustainability activities of the ALTANA Group evaluated for the first time. An online assessment was made by the internation- ally active company Eco Vadis by means of a questionnaire and a document check. We received the silver rating. We have provided our customers with detailed results of the assessment on the Eco Vadis supplier portal. Energy Efficiency and Reduction of CO² Emissions Reducing specific CO² emissions has been a key component of ALTANA’s sustainability strategy since 2007. At that time, we set ourselves the goal of cutting these emissions by 30 % by 2020. To quantify the emissions, we relate the amount of climate-relevant emissions to gross value added, which is the sum of EBITDA and personnel expenses. The specific emissions of the Group as a whole decreased by 10 % compared to the previous year. This result is particularly remarkable because the energy-intensive oper- ations that we acquired in 2013 also made a first important contribution to reducing emissions in the year under review. Compared to the emissions in 2007, the emissions in 2015 decreased by 12 %. This progress was possible thanks to various energy efficiency measures taken by our individual companies. In the year under review, these measures included steps to improve heat recovery (at the sites in Tongling, China, and Ankleshwar, India) and changing energy sources (at the sites in Bremen and Hartenstein, Germany) to reduce emis- sions arising during production. Furthermore, a number of sites have pushed ahead their plans to erect especially efficient 70 Environment, Safety, and Corporate Social Responsibility
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