Group Management Report Products Safety and Health Environment Human Resources Social Commitment Consolidated Financial Statements 81
Sustainable Product Strategy
ALTANA offers companies around the world specialty chemical
solutions that make products used in daily life better
and more sustainable. We convince our customers with added
value and give them a competitive edge through our work.
Some solutions improve, for example, the functions of end
products and increase their shelf life. 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 products 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 systematically
to a catalog of sustainability criteria at a very
early
stage of product development. This includes responsible
handling 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
number of coatings, additives, and pigment formulations
that are conceived for water-based applications and do not
need organic solvents.
Another aim of ALTANA’s product strategy is to replace
critical components with less critical ones whenever possible.
For products that need classifications due to national or
international hazardous substance regulations, ALTANA’s
companies have special data sheets on hand that provide
consumers with important information on safe storage
and further processing. Moreover, certified lifecycle analyses
are available for certain products.
The Keep Changing Agenda for the future supports the
ALTANA
Group’s sustainability strategy, among other things.
A central action field of the future agenda is “Take the
lead in sustainability.” To achieve this goal, new criteria were
defined in purchasing, research and development, M&A,
investment
related activities, and in the initiative to improve
corporate processes, called ALTANA Excellence, in order to
address ecological and social aspects in addition to economic
ones.
Products Promoting Climate Protection
The trend toward usage of water-based coatings and resin
systems continued in the period under review. Legal regulations,
for example the restriction on organic solvent-containing
coatings in China, and customer requirements have
led to a growing demand for water-based products.
A good example are the activities of ALTANA’s largest
division, BYK, which recognized this development at an
early
stage and in the last five years has developed and marketed
more than 30 new products for water-based systems.
The additives and instruments specialist achieves more than
40 percent of its sales alone with wetting and dispersing
additives, defoamers, and water-based rheology additives.
An exemplary product is the recently introduced VOC-free
defoamer BYK-1786 for aqueous systems used to remove
microfoam. This defoamer has a wide range of applications
and is particularly suitable for environmentally friendly
architectural and general industrial coatings. In general,
BYK is relying on aqueous systems as a future technology.
Water-based coatings are topical alternatives to conventional
systems. In most cases they perform just as well and
are as easy to process, while being profitable and environmentally
sound at the same time.