Environmental Sustainability - Protecting the environment by acting responsibly

As a MedTech company, Sysmex Europe cares about health which is closely connected to a clean and healthy environment. Having this in mind, Sysmex Europe sees it as a duty and task to contribute to a healthy and liveable environment and to counteract climate change with its corporate sustainability.

With operating businesses all over the EMEA region and reagent production sites, Sysmex Europe is aware of its environmental impact due to the use of water, energy, and natural resources and focuses on a responsible resource consumption. One of the main aspects regarding sustainability is therefore, to become more eco-friendly - to reduce carbon emissions, to use more renewable and clean energy, to improve recycling processes in the medical industry and to minimize the environmental impact on natural resources in general. 

Our company philosophy – The Sysmex Way – is an integral part of how we work, and reflected in all we do. Consistency for us means taking the environment into account when producing our products and interacting with our surroundings. In practice, this involves using natural resources sustainably as well as reducing pollution and waste. Since the Neumünster plant began producing reagents in 1993, remarkable advances have been achieved in its environmental performance. By using Sysmex reagents with Sysmex equipment you are supporting our environmental efforts to produce reagents responsibly.

Water savings
To produce haematology reagents you need highly purified water. This purification guarantees the reagents have a long shelf life and the analysers will perform well because of low background counts and high lot-to-lot stability. But every purification process produces ‘reject’ water. Conventional systems have a yield of 65% – for every 100 litres of purified water produced 35 litres are wasted. Our state-of-the-art reverse osmosis system produces pure water from the reject so our yield is 82%. Water consumption has also fallen relative to the volume of reagents manufactured through steam-in-place equipment sterilisation, which reduces the amount of water required to disinfect production equipment.

Recycling
In 2016, 91.5% of our cardboard, plastic and metal refuse was recycled as a result of on-going improvements in our waste separation system. Moreover, our cardboard reagent packaging is now made up of around 50% recycled material, while some two-thirds of the non-recycled cardboard comes from sustainable FSC-certified sources.  

Energy savings
The greatest progress in saving energy has come from our rooftop photovoltaic system. Approx. 15% of our plant’s electricity is now produced by solar power and all the electricity we purchase from external providers is generated by hydroelectric power. Our flagship solar ice system helps to heat the plant in winter and cool it in summer in an extremely energy-efficient manner: the heating or cooling output is around six times higher than the input of electricity. Another energy-efficient feature of our plant, the heat recovery system, enables us to use warm air inside to heat up the cold air coming in from outside before the used air is released into the atmosphere. This reduces our annual heating costs by about 20%. Last but not least, our average power consumption has fallen through more efficient use of production equipment and replacing autoclave by steam-in-lace sterilisation to reduce our steam requirements when disinfecting materials.