Environmental Sustainability in Operations

Environmental Sustainability in Operations

Oerlikon has long been dedicated to developing sustainable innovations and technologies, many of which we develop in collaboration with external partners and customers. We recognize the need to apply those same principles of innovation to our own operational processes and systems and to reduce the impact of our business on the environment.

Our overall strategy for reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions relies on optimizing efficiency on both a small and greater scale. That can mean anything from replacing conventional lighting with LED lighting to putting the recovered heat from combined heat and power systems to use.

We have set ambitious targets for the next decade. In 2030, we intend to:

(i)    Implement ISO-50001-certified or Oerlikon de­fined Energy Management Systems (EnMS) at all relevant sites 
(ii)    Use electrical energy derived exclusively from renewable resources;
(iii)    Reduce the share of disposed waste to 21% of total waste and 
(iv)    Achieve climate neutrality in 100% of our operations.

The first three of our environment targets – implementing EnMS at all our relevant sites, switching to purchasing and consuming energy solely from renewable resources and reducing waste – combined with other large and small energy-saving and emission-reduction initiatives, such as switching to LEDs and electric vehicles for sales and deliveries, will support our efforts toward achieving climate neutrality in our operations.

All our environmental targets consider relevant sites, which are production sites and large office sites, excluding small offices with less than 50 employees. In 2021, we included additional data from a few small offices and sites that are minority owned when they provided the data. Together, all these sites are called operational sites.

In 2021, the environmental key performance data from 160 operational sites was consolidated, including all production sites, one of which is minority owned, and excluding sites acquired in 2021. In the 2019 baseline year, data from 155 sites was consolidated. The increase in sites is attributed to newly opened sites and to a site acquired in 2020 and reported in 2021.

From the acquisitions of INglass and Coeurdor, we added 23 sites to Oerlikon’s global footprint, ten of them are considered relevant sites.

We made progress in 2021 in our environmental performance and will continue to work toward improvements in energy efficiency and reductions in energy consumed, resources and waste – and toward our targets.

Contact

Thomas Schmidt

Head of Group Communications
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