Circular economy | Boehringer Ingelheim

A total of 2.5 billion tons of waste is generated every year in the European Union alone. Some of it ends up unused in landfills. The EU is trying to improve this situation, for example by aiming for 65 percent of household waste to be recycled by 2030. For Boehringer Ingelheim, recycling activities have been part of waste management since the 1960s. Now, with Sustainable Development – For Generations and our pillar MORE GREEN we want to achieve more than just meeting legal requirements and are making various adjustments to do so.

A wide range of measures to close the circle

All company divisions are contributing to this successful waste management, such as the administration department: Optimized waste containers and information posters make it easier for employees to separate waste. Discarded IT equipment does not end up in the trash but is sent to the non-profit company AfB (German abbreviation for "Work for People with Disabilities") for reprocessing. There, the devices are either resold or recycled professionally.

In the canteen, the goal for the next few years is "Zero Single-Use Plastic". Single-use plastic is to become a thing of the past by the end of 2021, with take-away food only being made available in combination with wooden cutlery and straws made of biodegradable material. At the beginning of 2019, every employee in Germany also received a porcelain to-go cup. With 15,000 potential coffee and tea drinkers, this means (at least in times without COVID-19 restrictions) that there are half a million fewer disposable cups and 200,000 fewer plastic lids per year.

We also pay attention to reusability in product development. For example, we have refined the Respimat^® and launched it with a sustainable product design in 2019: the new inhaler is reusable and therefore more environmentally friendly than its predecessor. Used inhaler cartridges can now be easily replaced with new ones. A 3-month pack thus reduces the CO₂ footprint over the product life cycle by 57 percent compared with a former 1-month pack. For 6-month use, the reduction is as much as 71 percent.

Sustainable management, now and in the future

But Boehringer Ingelheim’s commitment will not end with the examples mentioned above, says Alexander Oehm, waste management officer at the Ingelheim site. His job is to keep track of the waste management there, and to look for opportunities to optimize it further. "Just because a new measure to reduce waste has been introduced, it doesn't mean that the issue is done with", Oehm says. "Boehringer Ingelheim is constantly looking for new ways to close the circle." True to the credo: protect the environment and climate while conserving resources.