Group Management Report Products Safety and Health Environment Human Resources Social Commitment Consolidated Financial Statements 91
Responsible Usage of the Resource Water
Water plays an important role in many of the ALTANA Group’s
production processes, and so the specialty chemicals group
is making various efforts to deal sparingly with this resource.
Water is used in the chemical industry as a raw material,
as a cleaning agent, and as a coolant. ALTANA aims to keep
its water consumption as low as possible and to use it as
a cooling medium in closed loop systems.
At its Swiss site in Vétroz, ECKART is in a first step optimizing
control of the pump unit in an exemplary way, thus
reducing the amount of water used for cooling. As a consequence,
3,000 m³ of groundwater can be saved. In a second
step, the cooling systems will be converted to closed
loop cooling systems.
At its Indian site in Ankleshwar, ELANTAS successfully
carried out a pilot project (“Zero Discharge”) aimed at
reducing the amount of wastewater significantly. The wastewater
is treated in several process steps, and in the end
less than 2 % of the initial volume has to be disposed of.
The largest share can be reused as water, say, for cooling
the production plant.
Further Waste Management Improvement
When it comes to waste management, ALTANA’s main
strategy is to avoid waste or reduce the amount of waste it
produces.
At BYK’s Kempen site a usage possibility was found
for a byproduct that until now had to be disposed of at great
cost. So far, this byproduct has been partially fed back into
the process, which, however, was very laborious and costly
due to the lower quality and the additional processing
time required. Now customers have been found that can
use this product for their processes with no further steps.
At ECKART’s U.S. site in Louisville, previously, aluminum
powder, which arises as waste during production and cannot
be reused by ECKART for quality reasons, was disposed
of as landfill waste. Now a recycling operation has been developed
that melts this aluminum powder and enables
it to
be recycled. As a result, 22.5 tons of landfill waste can be
avoided per year.
By optimizing its waste management at its U.S. site in
Wallingford, BYK increased the percentage of waste used
thermally from 52 % to 60 % and thus considerably reduced
the amount of waste for disposal.
Emissions Reduced Further
In addition to CO², which mainly arises during the combustion
of fossil fuels, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) also
contribute to emissions. ALTANA aims to continue keeping
these emissions as low as possible in the future. To achieve
this goal, various technical possibilities are available at many
sites, which will continue to be used and will be expanded
in the coming years.
Technical improvements, for example the installation of
an additional condensate cooler at a plant to recover solvents
at ELANTAS in Ankleshwar, also contribute to a significant
reduction of local emissions.
In a broader sense, ALTANA considers noise to be an
emission. At all sites measures are being taken to reduce
noise. At ACTEGA’s Grevenbroich site, highly efficient mufflers
were installed in the ventilation systems, enabling
noise levels to be reduced from 82 dB (A) to 39 dB (A) per
ventilator.