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OUR IMPACT: 200 000 TONS LESS CO2 OVER 4 YEARS

For our beauty and laundry & home care products produced in Europe, such as Schauma, Gliss, Fa, Persil, Somat, Perwoll, we source many ingredients from our supplier BASF. Within the framework of a cooperation, we decided to finance BASF to increase the amount of renewable raw materials for the manufacture of these ingredients and, thus, reduce the related CO2 footprint by  200 000 tons in total over the duration of four years, starting January 2023. That’s how much an airplane would emit if it flew around the world more than 76 times.

RENEWABLE RAW MATERIAL SOURCES ARE KEY FOR CO2 REDUCTION

The key to our CO2 reduction is the source of the raw materials used for ingredients for our products. In general, there are two different kinds:
1. Fossil raw materials:
These are raw materials which are limited, such as petroleum, crude oil or natural gas. To make use of them, they need to get extracted from earth which brings buried CO2 to the planet’s surface. With this, the overall amount of CO2 in our atmosphere gets increased.
2. Renewable raw materials:
These come from existing plants. Plants capture CO2 from the air, use the carbon (along with water) as source and then release oxygen back into the air (photosynthesis). With this cycle, no additional CO2 is released into the  atmosphere and the process is therefore neutral with regard to global warming.
Taking these differences into account, we started our cooperation with BASF that is one of our main suppliers of ingredients. We finance BASF to replace more and more fossil raw materials during their manufacturing process of ingredients with renewable raw materials. Thus, the  CO2 footprint is reduced.
As only the source of the raw materials is changing, but the ingredients stay the same, the performance of the products stay at the same high quality standard.

OUR APPROACH: BIOMASS BALANCE TO REPLACE FOSSIL SOURCES 

In BASF production system sustainable certified renewable raw materials sourced from Europe and fossil raw materials are combined to manufacture the ingredients (so called “biomass balance approach”). These are used for the production of Henkel’s beauty and laundry & home care products. This approach is monitored by an independent third party (TÜV Nord). They certify the ingredients BASF manufactures for Henkel’s products according to the recognized REDcert2 certification scheme for sustainable biomass.
The approach is comparable to sourcing of renewable electricity. When paying for renewable electricity you cannot guarantee the electricity entering your home comes directly from renewable sources such as solar panels. But you can be sure that the equal amount of energy you buy is produced somewhere by green technologies and enters the electricity grit.
Same applies for our cooperation with BASF: We cannot guarantee that the ingredients BASF manufactures for our products are directly made from renewable raw materials. But we can be sure that the equal amount of ingredients is produced on the basis of renewable raw materials at BASF. Therefore, the approach is called “mass balance”.
You will find more detailed information about our cooperation here.

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