Manufacturing

The main contribution of our manufacturing sites to our sustainability journey comes through focusing on the HSE challenges as defined in our Corporate Dashboard:

• Improving Safety Performance: all Business Units have Behavior Based Safety Programs – which involve all employees and focus on reducing unsafe situations and unsafe behaviors – running at their manufacturing sites.
• Developing Sustainable Fresh Water Management: all manufacturing sites have completed the mandatory Sustainable Fresh Water Management Assessment in 2010. Of the sites, 48 percent have sustainable fresh water management systems in place; all AkzoNobel sites will have Sustainable Fresh Water Management by the end of 2015.
• Reducing Carbon Emissions from our Manufacturing Operations, in line with the AkzoNobel Carbon Policy, we continue to focus on improving the energy efficiency and managing the fuel mix of our energy intensive businesses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and potential carbon costs. Several manufacturing sites have developed initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint by changing their primary fuel mix or by converting to power consumption from renewable sources. (eg woodchips boiler Salt Mariager, Denmark; steam from waste project in Hengelo, The Netherlands)
• Improving Raw Materials Efficiency by decreasing total waste per ton. A Corporate cross-functional team has been established to support our businesses to achieve their targets.

Within AkzoNobel Technology & Engineering a Manufacturing Support Group assists Businesses in improving their overall process efficiency (ao decreasing downtime and frequency of process disturbances; these are often the underlying causes of waste, wastewater and lack of energy efficiency).