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Because it’s up to all of us to halt the tide of climate change and protect the environment, we are cutting down our emissions, reducing our energy consumption and manage natural resources responsibly.
Climate change is one of the major challenges facing us in the 21st century. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in 2015, 195 of the world's nations adopted the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C. We, too, are doing our part to help stem climate change because we believe that climate protection and energy efficiency will pay off in the long run - for both the environment and our business.
Our climate actions:
Read more in our Sustainability Statement under ESRS E1 - Climate Change.
2040
is the year by which we aim to achieve climate neutrality.
-50%
By 2030, we intend to reduce our direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions (Scope 1 and 2) by 50% (2020 baseline).
80%
We aim to cover 80% of our purchased electricity with renewables by 2030.
52%
We have pledged to lower our indirect emissions along the entire value chain (Scope 3) by 52% per euro value added (2020 baseline).
Building on the progress made with air-to-sea conversion of our Healthcare logistics routes, our Life Science business sector launched its global Mode Shift program in 2023 to transition from air to sea freight shipments where feasible. The rollout is continuing across our Life Science operations as a major decarbonization lever.
When it comes to waste, we firmly believe in prevention, recovery and recycling. We attempt to prevent waste by developing new production processes and optimizing existing ones. However, it is not (yet) possible to avoid waste altogether, so we diligently separate the trash that we do generate. This allows valuable raw materials to be recovered and transformed into new products, thereby supporting a circular economy. We discard the unrecyclable waste in an environmentally sustainable manner in line with the strictest waste disposal standards. As part of our waste target 2030, we aim to achieve a circularity rate of 70% throughout the company. We report the circularity rate under ESRS E5 and ESRS 2 (SBM-1) as it is one of our strategic sustainability key indicators used to measure our circular waste practices and meet our related target.
Read more in our Sustainability Statement under ESRS E5 - Resource Use and Circular Economy.
With water scarcity affecting more and more regions worldwide, responsible water management is of key importance to us, especially as we too depend on water to manufacture our products.
Our wastewater may contain traces of substances such as heavy metals or active pharmaceutical ingredients, making it our responsibility to minimize the impact of our wastewater across all our sites. To us, sustainable water stewardship means not harming the aquatic ecosystems from which we obtain freshwater, or into which we discharge treated wastewater. We strictly adhere to government regulations and even go beyond: By 2030, we plan to reduce potentially harmful residues in our wastewater to below the no-effect threshold, a scientifically defined limit below which no negative environmental impacts are to be expected.
To boost our water efficiency, we defined a Water Intensity Score. The score relates the amount of water withdrawn at a given site to the number of hours worked, while taking the local availability of water into account.
Read more in the Sustainability Statement under E2 - Pollution.
50 %
We have committed to improving our Water Intensity Score by 50% by 2025 (2020 baseline)
In December 2023, the fourth purification stage of the wastewater treatment plant was commissioned at the Darmstadt site. With the help of a cloth filter and activated carbon filters, the current cleaning performance of the central plant is further enhanced. The fourth purification stage will have a significant impact on the removal of trace substances in particular and further improve the quality of the wastewater.
While the loss of biodiversity often happens quietly and invisibly, its effects have the potential to fundamentally disrupt society and economies. We are determined to understand and measure our impact on natural systems, in our own operations as well as in our value chain. Biodiversity is a cornerstone of our sustainability strategy, seamlessly integrated into our strategic focus areas around resource use, sustainable innovations and technologies for our customers, and a sustainable and transparent supply chain. To ensure a coherent and company-wide approach, we are implementing a biodiversity roadmap for all business sectors and their supply chains.
Key figures help us to assess how sustainable our company is. They enable us to measure our progress.
We want to reduce the environmental and health impacts of our products across their entire life cycle.
