The largest German corporations produce gigantic mountains of rubbish. Compared to the previous year, the amount has even increased. By far the most falls at RWE at; the energy company produced 4.5 million tons of waste in the past fiscal year. The chemical giants follow BASF (2.2 million tons) and Bayer (a good one million tons) and the building materials giant Heidelberg Materials. Only then come the car manufacturers: bmw, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen. The least amount of waste is generated SAP: 212 tons.
The platform now has what happens to this waste Resourceify
examined, which is dedicated to promoting the circular economy. In a comprehensive analysis of the annual and sustainability reports of the Dax 40 companies, she comes to the conclusion that the average recycling rate of the corporations is 69 percent. “It’s gratifying to see that the recycling rate of DAX companies has increased by an average of 13 percentage points compared to the previous year,” said Resourcify CEO Gary Lewis. However, the companies act very differently.
The amount of waste produced naturally varies significantly depending on the industry. That the large industrial groups produce more waste than, for example, insurers alliance, online retailer Zalando or die Deutsche Bank, is obvious. Ten of the 40 Dax companies – including Adidas, Continental, the German postal service or Commerbank – don’t give any information about it. Particularly striking are the German car manufacturers: BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen Daimler trucks Although they also produce a lot of waste, they achieve recycling rates of well over 95 percent in some cases. The recycling champion in the Dax is the chip company Infineon, which is the only one of the Dax companies examined to have recycled 100 percent of its waste (although it only produced a good 18,000 tons).
RWE’s major waste producers recycle only 16 percent, while chemical giants BASF and Bayer each recycle around half of their waste. The fragrance company Symrise has the worst recycling rates: it only recycles around 7 percent of its waste. In total, 31 percent of the waste produced in the past financial year was not recycled at all. That corresponded to at least 4 million tons.
And the recycling term used by the corporations in their reports could also be improved. For example, most corporations count the “thermal recycling” of waste, i.e. classic waste incineration, as recycling, which is not common in general.