Waste and Recycling

Important information on "Environmental Protection" can also be found in our Annual Report.

In nearly all countries the law requires exhaustive reporting on waste volumes and waste streams. Covestro’s sites comply with all such requirements. In Germany, for example, there are waste-tracking procedures between the source of the waste and disposal of the waste that enable end-to-end traceability of the waste flows. Classification in the individual waste categories and the corresponding methods of disposal is according to the locally applicable definitions. Based on this documentation, we prepare and evaluate the Covestro Group’s waste footprint, which is published annually.

A pilot project was launched at our production facility in Dormagen for the purpose of testing a new process for manufacturing our major product TDI. This will enable us to boost the yield of the already highly efficient TDI gas-phase process. As a result, this will lead to a further significant decline in the amount of waste volume generated in the production process, which would otherwise be incinerated. The process tested in Dormagen can then be replicated for further production processes at other Covestro sites. The next proposed step is to equip our large-scale TDI production facility in Shanghai (China) with this technology.

The total volume of waste generated remained on a par with the year before. The increase in non-hazardous waste by 5.0% is primarily due to a larger quantity of construction waste resulting from the construction of a new campus near our Group headquarters in Leverkusen, Germany. On the other hand, the volume of hazardous waste produced fell by 2.4% in the reporting year. One of the main reasons for this is the reduction in TDI waste, among other things as a result of the above-mentioned project in Dormagen. Following the carve-out of Covestro from Bayer AG, there was no further need to internally landfill waste in 2018.

Once again in 2018, Covestro’s Global Sideline Business unit sold legacy plant and equipment on the market or transferred these within the Group, thereby returning them to the resource cycle. This supports the circular economy, while conserving resources on a global scale. All Covestro sites worldwide operate according to the same standards and workflows, and return metal scrap as well as used packaging to the resource cycle.