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Progressing Toward a Sustainable Future

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Like people everywhere, you’re trying to find your path to environmental responsibility. At Oerlikon, our approach to sustainable innovation creates technological inventions that enable industries and their customers — people like you — to do more with less.

Innovation for a Sustainable Future

Our passion is leading advances in materials engineering and developing solutions designed to ensure that living sustainably is central to living our best lives.  
 
We love the challenge: the chance to push the boundaries of innovation to serve our planet and society. That’s how Oerlikon defines sustainability and how sustainability defines Oerlikon. And we invite you to explore our ideas for building a cleaner and healthier planet.

Our customers are actively seeking means of reducing resource consumption, eliminating waste and lowering emissions of harmful substances. They turn to Oerlikon for solutions that meet these ambitious goals. Our capacity for delivering sustainable innovation reverberates across sectors whose environmental practices have global impact: aerospace, automotive, energy, mining, construction, polymer processing and many other industries. Every positive step we take with them toward a more sustainable planet carries benefits for our environment and all the living beings on Earth.   

It’s no surprise that we have applied these high standards of innovation to our own operations and practices. For several years, Oerlikon has been creating pilot initiatives that we intend to implement company-wide to the greatest extent possible. For example, we are committed to achieving CO2 neutrality in all our locations by 2030 as we have already done at a site in Liechtenstein that provides our blueprint for meeting this commitment. Our goals also include obtaining 100% of our electrical energy from renewable sources and achieving the standard of Zero Harm to People.  

What inspires us to believe we can fulfill such demanding ambitions? 

Learn more

 
 

Oerlikon achieves silver in the EcoVadis sustainability rating

Oerlikon achieves silver in the EcoVadis sustainability rating

Silver in the 2023 EcoVadis sustainability rating: Oerlikon

In 2023, Oerlikon was able to improve its rating in EcoVadis index from bronze to silver, joining the top 19% of industrial companies represented in the rating. 

EcoVadis is the most trusted provider of sustainability rating Worldwide, rating companies from 175 countries in the dimensions Environment, Labor and Human Rights, Ethics and Sustainable Procurement.

The improved rating underlines the efforts made by the entire company to work toward a sustainable future for us and especially our customers.

Our Responsibility to Stakeholders

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework demonstrating Oerlikon’s priorities as a business and as a global citizen. While we support all the SDGs, eight of them are the most relevant in terms of our ability to serve the environment, our people and every individual or community with a stake in our work.

Our stakeholders are equally important in determining our role and responsibility. We recognize that our relationships with each of these stakeholders are essential to our ability to pursue growth targets and maintain our standards of business conduct. It is in keeping with the needs and expectations of our customers, employees, investors, policymakers, capital markets and civil society that we can achieve sustainable results and long-term growth.

Longtime advocates of partnership in bringing innovation to market, we value listening to our customers and collaborating with suppliers and contractors in support of our shared commitments. Within our company, we encourage curiosity and that individual employees and teams are open to unconventional ideas. In our experience, a workplace that gives its employees the freedom to reach their potential is just as essential as investment in R&D resources in commercializing industry-leading innovations.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

At Oerlikon, we affirm both the ideals and the necessities of each of the 17 United Nations SDGs. Given the nature of our business, processes and operations, we have a greater impact on certain SDGs compared to others.

According to where we can make the greatest difference, both in our practices and in our impact on the planet and its people, whether globally or in the communities in which we work, we have identified eight SDGs: Goal 3 Good Health And Well-Being, Goal 5 Gender Equality, Goal 7 Affordable and Clean Energy, Goal 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth, Goal 9 Industry, Innovation And Infrastructure, Goal 12 Responsible Consumption And Production, Goal 13 Climate Action and Goal 17 Partnerships For The Goals.

Driving Customers' ESG Progress

At Oerlikon, our role is to enable our customers, their customers and the industries they serve to achieve more with less. Specifically, we aim to help customers to achieve more in terms of savings, efficiency and productivity, while using fewer resources such as energy and materials. In doing so, we help them to reach their sustainability and economic goals. With our technologies, we enable less fuel consumption in airplanes, facilitate future mobility, extend the lifetime of tools, save energy and reduce waste in processing polymers, and beyond.
 

Get in Touch

Sara Vermeulen-Anastasi

Sara Vermeulen-Anastasi

Head of Group Communications
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