Sustainability Management

Environmental and social responsibility is an important component of our corporate policy.

We take environmental, social and product-related aspects into account when making business decisions. We continuously implement measures in different areas of the company, both internally and externally. To support this approach, our management systems are being audited against the ZNU Standard for Sustainable Management and ISO 14001 for the first time this year. Through these assessments, we aim to further develop our management systems and processes.

In order to fulfil our energy policy principles, we have been certified according to DIN EN ISO 50001 for several years.

Thus, through a system of collective responsibility, we have established the foundations for pursuing our medium and long-term environmental, energy and operational objectives.

In terms of environmental and operational objectives, we focused on the topic of waste disposal in the “Economy” area for several years. This topic was relevant for two reasons: on the one hand, high waste volumes resulted in high disposal costs, which represented an important economic factor. On the other hand, reducing waste volumes was also relevant from a resource management perspective. In 2023, we introduced a separate “Environment” area and assigned the objective of reducing disposal volumes to this topic area.

Since 2023, the “Economy” area has therefore focused on increasing plant productivity (PTU – Production Time Utilisation). PTU describes the percentage of production time actually used after deducting planned downtime. The objective was to increase PTU by a total of 9% to 73.56%. In 2023, a PTU value of 68.55% was achieved. This figure increased further in 2024, resulting in an average PTU of 73.9%.

In the area of social matters, we have been focusing on occupational safety since 2020. Here we set ourselves the objective of reducing lost time due to occupational accidents in relation to total hours worked. The key figure monitored for this purpose describes the percentage of days lost due to accidents. It therefore indicates how long employees were unable to return to work following a workplace accident. Indirectly, it also provides information about the severity of occupational accidents.

Looking back, a positive development can be observed. At the end of 2019, the rate was 0.2705%. Our objective was to reduce this figure to 0.250% in 2020. This target was not achieved in the first year, resulting in a rate of 0.2804%. Occupational safety therefore remained a focus area in 2021. Following the implementation of internal measures, the absenteeism rate was reduced to 0.2163%. As a result, the original target of 0.250% was achieved.

This development reflects the ongoing focus on occupational safety within the company.