PETplanet Insider Vol. 26 No. 12/25 www.petpla.net 19 EDITOUR A new project is a washing agent made entirely from renewable plantbased sources – corn starch and other plant materials. Currently in testing phase, it promises complete biodegradability with minimal impact on wastewater treatment, and potentially food-contact approval under FDA standards. The department Recycling Solutions has also eliminated mineral oil from all defoaming products and developed silicone-oil-free variants to improve environmental compatibility. The product has been successfully tested at customer sites for years and consistently received good feedback, representing a shift from merely “less harmful” chemistry to genuinely regenerative materials. The infrastructure behind transformation But chemistry alone doesn’t close loops. Dr Annegret Vester, CHT’s Chief Sustainability Officer and a chemist by background, has spent over a decade building the systems that make sustainability at CHT scalable. When the company began its formal sustainability journey, even basic data collection proved difficult. “We spent years creating understanding about data accuracy,” Vester recalls. The company approached it very analytically and developed a custom IT system to track water consumption, energy use, and waste generation across all sites, gradually refining data quality and validation processes. CHT set specific targets and has tracked them globally ever since. The process involves not just measurement but accountability: subsidiaries receive annual performance reports and are expected to propose improvement measures. By 2015, CHT had written its first sustainability report and incorporated sustainability into corporate strategy. EcoVadis certification followed in 2016, with the company steadily improving its rating. More significantly, CHT committed to Science Based Targets in 2021: reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 42% in Scope 1 and 2, and 25% in Scope 3 by 2030 (baseline 2021), with net-zero targeted by 2045 worldwide. The company reports according to CSRD standards and participates in multiple sustainability frameworks including SBTi. “We advance our sustainability efforts by not only setting annual targets, but by backing them up with concrete measures, tracking them at the end of each year, and reporting retrospectively in the following year,” Vester explains. “Where we really struggle is with the upstream emissions caused by purchased goods and materials – they are quite simply the biggest challenge for the chemical industry. The industry has committed to making the entire chain, includWemaximize your đēĐąĖĄĕĊĐď ĆħĄĊĆďĄĚ With Netstal’s leading injectionmolding technology and customizable turnkey systems for high-performance beverage closure production. Closures
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