In our operations, sustainability relates to emissions, environmental impact and also the safety of our people.
We’re making great progress on sustainability across our operations. Our new environmental dashboard has helped provide more accurate and frequent environmental data at all levels of our operations, showing us that even incremental changes add up and contribute to our long-term targets. And major changes, such as ending our use of coal-fired power, make a big difference immediately.
In addition, we’ve introduced a new project sustainability scorecard to help all our sites assess the potential environmental impact of large-scale capital projects before deciding whether to go ahead.
Safety
It’s our policy that everyone is responsible for safety, health and the environment (SHE) at Synthomer, and we want everyone who works with us to feel able to speak up if they see unsafe or harmful behaviour. We have an overall Safety, Health and Environment Management System (SHEMS) that every site needs to adhere to, and our sites meet ISO 14001 standards or equivalent. Our policies are in line with the global chemical industry’s voluntary Responsible Care® programme to drive continuous improvement in safe chemicals management.
We aim to cut all accidents to zero globally and continue to show good progress on our overall journey, even when integrating businesses and sites with lower safety standard.
Emissions
Our 2030 target is a 47% reduction in absolute Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions against a 2019 baseline, along with a 28% absolute reduction on Scope 3 emissions, currently being validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. As of 2022, we have already achieved a 36% absolute reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions and 18% on our Scope 3 emissions. At our plant in Sokolov, Czech Republic, in May 2022 we have stopped the use of coal in any of our operations globally, significantly reducing our Scope 1 emissions in 2022. Our innovation and procurement teams are also actively looking for ways that could help reduce our Scope 3 emissions quickly.
We’ve also gone well beyond our short-term objective to use 50% electricity from renewable sources in 2022, and have actually exceeded our 2030 goal of 80%. We’re improving energy efficiency in all our operations globally so that we don’t use more energy than necessary and we’re running several other projects to help reduce our energy use.
Water
We have a policy to manage and minimise water consumption, and introduce water management plans in water-stressed areas and at the sites where we use the most water. This is because our processes tend to need large amounts of water, for example in our cooling towers. And we need a significant amount of water to make our polymers, although this does help avoid more harmful solvents entering the atmosphere.
We’re working on ways to introduce more water and infrastructure monitoring, for example with automated metering, and exploring site assessments in line with the Alliance for Water Stewardship framework.