APC 2011 Annual Report Download - page 69

REGISTRATION DOCUMENT 2011 SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC 67
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
2
SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC’S COMMITMENT TOENVIRONMENTALPERFORMANCE
The Green Plastic program is carried out in collaboration with the
activities, the teams in charge of material purchasing and design
and is included in the Group actions for sustainable development.
The program follows a unique strategy for each type of plastic
focusing around three successive progress plans. A “green” plastic
must therefore:
1. be exempt from potentially toxic substances and have an end-of-
life evaluation scenario (material or energy);
2. come from a production sector that has low CO2 use (recycled
plastic or plastic from renewable sources);
3. come from a resource that does not compete with the food
sector either directly or indirectly, in the case that the Green
Plastic solution makes good use of a raw material from a
renewablesource.
The added value that customers expect from “green” plastics lies
in two major areas:
•residential applications exempt from substances of very high
concern, particularly including non-PVC and non-halogen fl ame
retardant product ranges;
•new energy effi cient offers, such as Effi cient Home, which use
plastics with a very low CO2 impact.
Schneider Electric uses a partnership approach in order to make
progress in research in this area. The Group therefore participates
in collaborative platforms such as the Paristech Mines Bioplastics
Chair or the Axelera competitive clusters initiative (in sustainable
chemistry) and Plastipolis (in plastics engineering).
Approach
Schneider Electric has extended its environmental system rollout
program beyond only the industrial sites to tertiary sites throughout
the 2009-2011 period. All these sites contribute to reporting, and
therefore to the Group targets. Priority objectives for 2009-2011 to
increase the number of employees working in ISO14001 certifi ed
sites and to reduce its energy consumption were set within the
framework of the Planet & Society Barometer for the entire Group.
The certifi cation objective helps focus continuous efforts to reduce
the main environmental impacts of the sites, shown in the table on
pages 98-99 :
•energy consumption;
•CO2 emissions;
•amount of waste produced;
•percentage of waste recovered;
•consumption of water;
•VOC emissions (Volatile Organic Compounds).
Action plans
ISO14001 certification of Group sites
As soon as the ISO14001 environmental management standard
was published in 1996, Schneider Electric decided to certify its
sites. For several years the Group has demanded that all industrial
and logistic sites with more than 50 people be ISO14001 certifi ed
within two years of their acquisition or creation.
The extension of this internal directive to all tertiary sites with more
than 300 people was enacted in the One program from 2009
and actually launched in 2010. The headquarters of the Group in
France, in Rueil-Malmaison, was thus certifi ed in 2010.
The Group’s priority objective, as set out in the Planet & Society
Barometer, is to enable two thirds of employees to work in
ISO14001 certifi ed sites. When the One program came to an end
in December2011, the target had been exceeded with more than
70% of employees working on ISO 14001 sites.
The challenge for the coming years is to maintain this performance
level by certifying all the new industrial sites within two years of their
acquisition or creation and to continue the new certifi cations of
large tertiary sites.
NB: This has already been achieved, ahead of the two year deadline,
for 26 industrial sites from the Areva D acquisition.
Management of industrial consumption
Water consumption
The Group provides a detailed breakdown of water consumption
that takes into account groundwater and water from the public
network. Water used solely for cooling and then immediately
released without any change is also included in the statistics.
Schneider Electric reports on the quantities of water consumed
by its sites on a six-monthly basis and monitors the per capita
consumption of water on a like-for-like basis in order to evaluate its
performance from one year to the next.
During the period of the One company program, the overall eco-
production approach allowed the Group to reduce its per capita
consumption of water by 6.8% by the end of 2011 in relation to
2010 on a like-for-like basis.
Water is not generally a critical resource in Schneider Electric’s
industrial processes.
Water is essentially used for sanitary purposes, sometimes for
cooling and in certain sites for surface treatment. In the latter case,
industrial water discharge is subject to treatment that is suitable
in terms of its pollutant potential and discharge into the natural
environment or in a plant subject to a monitoring plan.
As Schneider Electric industrial production is mainly based on
manual assembly processes or automatic processes for electrical
components and subsets, it has low water consumption and a
negligible impact on water quality.
Nevertheless, in 2011 the group initiated an analysis of industrial
site positions relative to water stress in different regions throughout
the world using the WBCSD tool (World Business Council for
Sustainable Development).
3.4 Eco-Production