Air and soil

Strategy

• Raw Material Verbund helps prevent and reduce waste
• Professional disposal of hazardous waste

Regular monitoring of our emissions to air is a part of environmental management at BASF. Aside from greenhouse gases, we also measure emissions of other pollutants into the atmosphere. Our reporting does not take into account air pollutant emissions from oil and gas operations due to their substantial fluctuation during exploration phases.

Our Raw Material Verbund helps us prevent and reduce waste. We regularly carry out audits to inspect external waste management companies, ensuring that our hazardous waste in particular is properly disposed of. In this way, we are also contributing to preventive soil protection and keeping today’s waste from becoming tomorrow’s contamination.

Emissions to air

• Further reduction of emissions

We were able to reduce absolute emissions of air pollutants from our chemical plants to 28,585 metric tons in 2015. This is a decrease of 66.6%, which means that our goal of a 70% reduction worldwide from 2002 to 2020 has almost been achieved. Emissions of ozone-depleting substances as defined by the Montreal Protocol totaled 23 metric tons in 2015 (2014: 36 metric tons). Emissions of heavy metals amounted to 4 metric tons (2014: 4 metric tons).

We were able to reduce emissions of sulfur oxides in 2015, particularly at our site in Hannibal, Missouri: There, we exchanged coal-fired boilers for gas-powered burners, saving around 1,000 metric tons of sulfur oxide.

Our product portfolio contains a variety of catalysts used in the automotive sector and in industry to reduce the emission of air pollutants. BASF’s Camet^® series of CO catalysts, for example, decreases the amount of carbon monoxide released by gas turbine plants in partial-load mode. As a complement to the use of renewable energies, this now environmentally friendly partial-load mode will become increasingly necessary in the future.

Management of waste and contaminated sites

• Reduction of total waste volume
• Systematic processing of contaminated sites ensured

We regularly explore possibilities for preventing waste. If waste is unavoidable, we perform an analysis for recycling or energy recovery. Total waste volume declined slightly in 2015 (–2.4%).

We develop remediation solutions in order to combine nature conservation, climate protection concerns, costs, and social responsibility. This means making decisions on a case-by-case basis, founded on the legal framework and current technological possibilities. We set out global standards for our approach to contaminated site management. A worldwide network of experts ensures their proper implementation.

We have been documenting relevant sites in a contaminated site database since 2013. Ongoing remediation work around the world continued on schedule and planning was concluded on future landfill remediation projects.