Sustainable Operations Management

Umicore utilizes the three concepts of sustainable management operation as life-cycle assessment, sustainable product design and green manufacturing, to produce and deliver products and services in a most possible sustainable way. Umicore are carrying out life cycle assessments (LCA) to evaluate the environmental burdens associated with their products and process, by identifying and quantifying energy wasted and materials used and released to the environmental, so they look for opportunity to identify possible improvements, establish benefits and explore comparisons with other materials. They recognize that LCA is a valuable tool to advance eco-efficiency of materials use. For example, they report every year a graph where they describe how the metal emission impact the waste of water and the pollution of the air, so they evaluate and look for the solution to avoid negative impact. “In terms of carbon emissions the Catalysis business group is the lowest emitter, accounting for a total of 13% of our CO2 equivalent emissions in 2014 or 87,118 tons of CO2 equivalent. This compares to 86,928 tons emitted in 2013.”   Another example is when they quantified the potential environmental impacts of the production of germanium from production scraps from the photovoltaic industry and then they compared them to the potential impacts of the primary production of germanium from coal, as results, the secondary production of germanium had lower impacts than the primary production by at least 95% across most germanium impact categories. Which they highlight the benefits of recycling germanium.

Furthermore, Umicore uses sustainable products designs principles for all of their products, for example, a few years ago, they added the concept of closing the loop where they should, wherever possible, seek to develop and implement technologies that help ensure that all materials that Umicore puts on the market can be recycled by Umicore and be transformed for use in new applications. Which means that Umicore implement in their materials one of the methods of sustainable product design: easier to recycle. Also, Umicore influence other companies to do the same, to make their product easier for them to recycle as phone mobile companies with their batteries. They develop and supplies a wide variety of metals-based specialty products to the fast growing rechargeable battery industry.

Lastly, Umicore use a green manufacturing because they produce gold, silver, platinum and metals by recycling and reusing materials from items that people even think it would work, such as mobile devices, cars, batteries; all their products are always 100% from recycling. By this way they are contributing to the environment by reducing pollution, waste of energy. They have also the lean system approach because they reduced the overproduction to reduce waste, and also to help the environment reducing the greenhouse gas emission and the waste of water.