Planning and objectives

All divisions and corporate services will successfully work on achieving the Group objectives by:

• Improving the energy efficiency of their manufacturing processes or activities
• Reducing the environmental impact of their manufacturing processes or activities
• Certifying the environmental management systems
• Enhancing “Green Purchasing” and environmental audits of suppliers
• Making greater use of multimodal transportation
• Increasing the environmental awareness at each level in the organisation.

The R&D and Engineering activities will focus on:

• Innovation in the manufacturing processes, in the aspects of energy, emissions and production efficiency
• Developing and renewing products that save energy and contribute to sustainable development, such as coatings and photovoltaic products or applications
• Research, trials and projects aimed at extending the possibilities for recycling of our products at the end of their life
• Replacing of the hazardous substances in our processes and products, beyond what is required by legislation.

The purchasing activities will focus on:

• Identifying, reducing and replacing the hazardous substances in the purchased materials that end up in products
• Further developing the “Green Purchasing” activities
• Ensuring compliance with the REACH and other regulations on chemical substances.

Flat glass production still faces a big challenge to find an optimum solution for reducing atmospheric emissions and specific energy consumption in the manufacturing process. The Industrial Emissions Directive (2010/75/EU), the Emissions Trading Directive (2009/29/EC) and the National Emission Ceilings Directive (2016/2284/EU) require some substantial efforts and this will be revised with more ambitious objectives in coming years. Since the issue of climate change has certainly gained in importance this will require even greater efforts to reduce energy consumption.

Automotive production focuses on sun reflecting coatings and reducing the weight of glass. This will contribute to one of the goals of the automotive producers to achieve better performance in terms of grams of CO₂ emitted per km as required by the European legislation.

Certified Environmental Management Systems (EMS) in the plants are considered essential in order to improve our performance and achieve the goals of our environmental policy. A certified EMS certainly helps to have a properly functioning PDCA cycle ("Plan, Do, Check, Act") that leads to full compliance, raised awareness and lower environmental impact.

In the Architectural Glass Division, all factories belonging to the Upstream Operations (raw glass production) are certified ISO 14001, as are the main plants in the Downstream Operations (glass processing). The Automotive division has an integrated ISO 14001 regional certification.