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. Therefore, 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.
Products and Technologies for More Climate
Protection
In the period under review, all divisions made progress
with products and technologies that enhance climate protection.
ACTEGA acquired and further developed an innovative
technology for the production of labels in the U.S. that
requires less material. It can save up to 80 percent in material
and significantly reduce the amount of waste. With this
technology, layers are printed in reverse order (1. top coat,
2. colors and 3. adhesive) on a release film and then transferred
to the object to be printed using specially developed
hardware. Since there is no label film on the item, the recyclability
is also improved substantially.
In addition, ACTEGA further reduced the share of raw
materials based on fossil fuels. For example, about 20 tons
of a raw material deployed to produce water-based paints
were conserved. In another project, ACTEGA achieved a signifi-
cant reduction of emissions of volatile organic compounds
(VOC). Through the targeted exchange of various raw materials,
VOC emissions were reduced by a total of around
40 tons. At the same time, the proportion of water-based
sealing compounds was increased further. This reduces
CO² emissions by an average of approximately 1.5 kg per kg
of sealant compared to products on an organic basis.
In the past years, BYK developed a new technology for
manufacturing additives. The core of this technology is a
reaction-mixing pump in which the raw materials are continuously
fed into a special mixing chamber. The advantages,
compared to conventional production in reactors, are the very
short reaction times, the lower energy consumption, and
the reduction of waste and emissions. BYK has already produced
the first wetting and dispersing additives using this
technology.
Furthermore, the division is working with a partner to
develop new and innovative technology for the extraction of
82 Products