Honoring the winners of the 2021 Responsible Care competition

Cli­mate pro­tec­tion is part of every­day life in the chem­i­cal and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try. The win­ning projects in this year’s Respon­si­ble Care com­pe­ti­tion “Our con­tri­bu­tion to cli­mate pro­tec­tion” orga­nized by the Ger­man Chem­i­cal Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion (VCI) are good exam­ples of this.

“Cli­mate-neu­tral pro­duc­tion is not just an emp­ty phrase for the chem­i­cal and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try. The projects in the Respon­si­ble Care 2021 com­pe­ti­tion are out­stand­ing role mod­els for how cre­ative­ly and inno­v­a­tive­ly com­pa­nies want to achieve this goal.”

- Wolf­gang Große Entrup, VCI Chief Exec­u­tive Officer

An expert jury decid­ed on the award­ing of places 1 to 3 as well as the win­ners of the two spe­cial cat­e­gories of medi­um-sized com­pa­nies and dig­i­tal­iza­tion. Auru­bis AG, Ham­burg, secured first place with its project “Inno­v­a­tive mod­el test for decar­boniz­ing the cop­per process.” For the first time, the mul­ti-met­al com­pa­ny — one of the world’s largest cop­per recy­clers — used cli­mate-neu­tral hydro­gen as a reduc­ing agent in cop­per pro­duc­tion in a pilot project to save sig­nif­i­cant amounts of car­bon diox­ide. If Auru­bis suc­ceeds in replac­ing the nat­ur­al gas pre­vi­ous­ly used as a reduc­ing agent with hydro­gen, a sav­ings poten­tial of 6,200 tons of car­bon diox­ide per year could be achieved for the anode fur­nace at the Ham­burg plant alone. The jury is con­vinced that the glob­al sav­ings poten­tial in met­al pro­duc­tion is huge. The use of green hydro­gen is inno­v­a­tive and the project has a lever­age effect for oth­er met­al pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties, the state­ment added.

DSM Nutri­tion­al Prod­ucts GmbH, Gren­zach, was reward­ed with sec­ond place for its “Roadmap to reduce green­house gas emis­sions.” The com­pa­ny’s ambi­tious goal is to achieve cli­mate-neu­tral pro­duc­tion by 2050. To achieve this, DSM has set up a new, sus­tain­able over­all con­cept: With con­sis­tent analy­sis and plan­ning, the com­pa­ny defines mea­sures to reduce green­house gas emis­sions in production.

Impor­tant idea gen­er­a­tors for this are work­shops last­ing sev­er­al days, so-called deep dives, in which experts from all spe­cial­ist areas ana­lyze the process­es and plants in detail. The jury was par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed by the sav­ings achieved to date and the involve­ment of employees.

Third place went to Boehringer Ingel­heim Phar­ma GmbH & Co. KG, Ingel­heim, with its project “Sus­tain­able from start to fin­ish”. At Boehringer Ingel­heim, cli­mate pro­tec­tion is inte­grat­ed into every­day work­ing life wher­ev­er pos­si­ble. Employ­ees are also brought on board, whether through the bike-to-share sta­tion for employ­ees on the com­pa­ny premis­es or the envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly cli­mate counter in the can­teen. Green elec­tric­i­ty is used on the plant site through a bio­mass pow­er plant, solar pan­els and from exter­nal renew­able ener­gy sources. This holis­tic approach, which turns employ­ees into micro-influ­encers, impressed the jury.

The SME prize was won by Dr. Babor GmbH & Co. KG, Aachen, with its project “Ful­ly auto­mat­ed dash­board for the cor­po­rate car­bon foot­print.” This enables the com­pa­ny to dig­i­tize and visu­al­ize its car­bon foot­print in real time. At the same time, it can also iden­ti­fy poten­tial for improve­ment and take appro­pri­ate pre­cau­tions to reduce car­bon diox­ide emis­sions. This is an out­stand­ing achieve­ment by a medi­um-sized com­pa­ny, the fed­er­al jury is quick to agree.

The Dig­i­ti­za­tion Award goes to BASF SE, Lud­wigshafen, for its “Strate­gic CO2 Trans­paren­cy Tool” project. In a stan­dard­ized and auto­mat­ed process, the com­pa­ny cal­cu­lates indi­vid­ual CO2 foot­prints for all 45,000 prod­ucts — in each case from the raw mate­r­i­al pur­chased to the ener­gy used in the pro­duc­tion process­es. BASF will be able to make this data avail­able to its cus­tomers from the end of 2021. With the help of this dig­i­tal solu­tion, it will be trans­par­ent and com­pre­hen­si­ble how many green­house gas emis­sions are gen­er­at­ed in the man­u­fac­tur­ing process of a prod­uct — a huge suc­cess that the jury would like to honor.

Background to Responsible Care and the competition

Vol­un­tar­i­ly doing more than is required by laws and reg­u­la­tions. This is doc­u­ment­ed by the chem­i­cal-phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try with its glob­al­ly unique Respon­si­ble Care ini­tia­tive — which has been run­ning in Ger­many for 30 years. Here, Respon­si­ble Care is a con­tri­bu­tion to the Chemie3 sus­tain­abil­i­ty initiative.

The Respon­si­ble Care com­pe­ti­tion starts at the state lev­el. This year, 92 projects were sub­mit­ted to the state asso­ci­a­tions. The state win­ners auto­mat­i­cal­ly take part in the nation­al com­pe­ti­tion. Here, the jury decid­ed on the nation­al win­ners from a total of 18 projects.

The asso­ci­a­tion rep­re­sents the eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy inter­ests of more than 1,700 Ger­man chem­i­cal and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies and Ger­man sub­sidiaries of for­eign groups vis-à-vis politi­cians, author­i­ties, oth­er sec­tors of indus­try, acad­e­mia and the media. In 2020, the indus­try gen­er­at­ed sales of just under 190 bil­lion euros and employed around 464,400 people.