ALTANA’s Understanding of Sustainability

As a globally manufacturing specialty chemicals company, ALTANA has diverse stakeholders with whom the Group and its different companies maintain regular contact and exchange. The content and results of these dialogs are among the factors that inform ALTANA’s understanding of sustainability.

The group of ALTANA’s most important stakeholders comprises our customers, our employees, and our shareholder. It also includes suppliers and other business partners, public authorities, associations, nongovernmental organizations, and our neighbors at the different locations.

Essential sustainability aspects are occupational health and safety, economic performance, emissions, effluents and waste, customer health and safety, products, energy, materials, water, procurement practices, as well as environmental protection expenditures and investments.

This overview does not contain aspects that ALTANA adheres to as a matter of course. This includes, for instance, unconditional implementation of all legal specifications in the countries and regions in which ALTANA is active, fulfillment of legal guidelines regarding environmental protection and product safety, condemnation of child labor, adherence to human rights, and the non-discrimination requirement.

To be able to measure not only the company’s business performance but also its involvement in all areas of sustainability, alongside key performance indicators and certified management systems, ALTANA is using external evaluations increasingly. The audits of the rating company EcoVadis and the Together for Sustainability (TfS) initiative of the chemical industry play a special role.

In 2016, ALTANA had itself evaluated by EcoVadis for the second time and was awarded the Gold Status. As a result, the Group improved significantly compared to 2015, when it received Silver Status. EcoVadis, which analyzes environmental aspects, procurement policy, compliance, and working conditions of companies based on the international sustainability guideline ISO 26000, has become one of the world’s leading ratings platforms for the chemical industry. 20,000 companies are now registered with it.

The TfS audit is based on a globally uniform sustainability standard and thus is also one of the most important rankings in this area. ECKART was the Group’s first company to successfully complete this several-day audit at its site in Zhuhai, China, at the beginning of 2016. The company swiftly implemented the few improvements suggested in the report in the course of the year.

To achieve its strategic targets, ALTANA relies on the Group’s proven decentralized structures, for which the holding company sets the framework. These structures include binding group guidelines for environmental protection, health, and safety. 

The managing directors of the respective companies bear entrepreneurial responsibility for the implementation of the strategic targets. Among other things, they are required to continuously reduce the environmental effects of their business activities. They are also in charge of anchoring the Environment, Health & Safety (EH&S) department in the company’s organization and for setting up a corresponding cross-site reporting system for the centrally prescribed key performance indicators. In 2016, BYK was the first division to create a worldwide EH&S organization with responsible persons for each site. Furthermore, the managing directors are also responsible for the introduction and certification of suitable management systems with which environmental protection and occupational safety can be practiced on the basis of international guidelines at the different sites. 

Independently of this decentralized organization of responsibility, the holding company is committed to providing knowledge and expertise on sustainability. This is the task of ALTANA’s Corporate EH&S specialist department. In addition, special, cross-divisional expert platforms foster the exchange of information on the relevant EH&S topics (for example energy, sustainability performance, and food contact) and the development of best-practice models that show efficient implementations. Consequently, in the future we will be able to offer our customers even better service around sustainability at ALTANA.