Data collection and development of methodologies empower us to see where we are hitting our performance benchmarks and where we need to make further efforts and investments in sustainable innovation solutions.
Oerlikon serves customers in the automotive, textile, polymer processing, tooling, space and aviation sectors, who in turn have customers in the defense industry. Oerlikon also provides solutions to the oil and gas industry. In these industries, Oerlikon takes a best-in-class approach in helping customers in these sectors to reduce their environmental or social footprint and meet their targets. Sales generated from defense and oil and gas comprise less than 5% of Oerlikon’s total revenue.
In 2021, we defined the criteria to categorize our products’ sustainability. We grouped them into three categories:
- Our tool coatings, whose objective is to improve customers’ production process from a sustainability perspective and so contribute to responsible consumption and production.
- Our component and materials business, whose objective is to enable sustainable applications or improve the overall system with regard to sustainability and thus contribute to climate action such as reducing CO2 emissions in aerospace.
- Our equipment business, whose objective is to achieve more sustainable production.
We consider our tool coatings to be sustainable when they improve the production process of at least one of the following: raw material consumption, energy consumption, emissions or service time. At the same time, the coating must deliver the same or better performance than the industry standard.
Our consolidated data shows that all our tool coatings improve at least one of the environmental criteria, as tools with standard coatings or high-performance coatings can perform up to ten times better than an uncoated tool. Comparisons of our tool coatings with industry standards identified some gaps — most already known — that contributed to our blueprint for R&D investments in next-generation coatings.
The component and materials business encompasses precision components, friction systems components, the materials business and additive manufacturing. As this is the broadest scope of our business, we define criteria based on the product application. The solution needs to improve the overall system compared to the industry standards in one or more of the following areas: energy consumption, social impact, waste, emissions or service time. Solutions are not classified as sustainable if there is no comparable industry standard.
Within our equipment business, we classify as sustainable any equipment that can reduce environmental impact relative to the industry standard in terms of one or more of the following: raw material consumption, energy consumption, water consumption, social impact, waste, emissions or service time.