Letter from the Management Board 3
for responsible and sustainable corporate management. For example, five sites each
had greenhouse gas emissions of less than 10 tons of CO² equivalents in the 2021 fiscal
year. When this report was published, the production sites of ACTEGA in Brazil and
ECKART in China were already completely CO² free. In addition, we consistently further
improved our carbon footprint at our home site in Wesel. For instance, BYK was able
to increase its heat generation efficiency from 85 to 95 percent and reduce the associated
greenhouse gas emissions by around 400 tons of CO² equivalents per year.
In Wesel, we opened up a new dimension for customer-specific product development and
thus for further sustainable growth in April with the commissioning of a high-through-
put screening facility – a digital high-performance laboratory that is unique in the specialty
chemicals industry. The facility, which uses state-of-the-art digitization technologies,
is the largest of its kind in the world and doubles BYK’s application technology capacity.
In product development, too, we set new standards in important future markets in
2021. At Formnext, the world’s leading international exhibition for additive manufacturing,
the cross-divisional technology platform Cubic Ink presented innovative printing
materials that have the potential to revolutionize industrial 3D inkjet printing.
In the year under review, the individual divisions also pushed forward innovations that can
change entire markets. In June, ACTEGA launched Signite, a new technology that
can halve waste from consumer goods label production. ECKART received the ALTANA
Innovation Award for the development of metallic effect pigments that open up new
perspectives for ecologically compatible automotive coatings. BYK presented the first certified
additive for wind turbines, which significantly increases the strength of the
material and thus the load-bearing capacity of the rotor blade. ELANTAS applied for a
patent for a groundbreaking process using special dyes that for the first time makes
it possible to indicate the state of wear of electric motors and thus prevent unnecessary
motor replacements.
In the 2021 fiscal year, we secured substantial funding for further green research projects.
In June, for example, the European Investment Bank (EIB) recognized our climate
protection
efforts in line with the EU’s Green Deal and provided us with a 200 million euro