Reducing waste is a critical tenet of sustainability practices, and it's also good business. Celanese deploys a global waste reduction strategy to actively reduce and minimize waste, avoid liability concerns, and achieve financial benefits. When determining the best method of managing waste, our EHS team follows a Pollution Prevention Hierarchy that helps determine if waste would be best managed by reuse, energy recovery, treatment to reduce toxicity, incineration, or disposal by land application in landfill or deep well. Whenever practical, Celanese employs reuse, recovery or treatment to reduce the company's environmental footprint and move the output of production along a lifecycle of usefulness. If Celanese cannot reuse a recyclable product, we search for and engage with our partners to find sustainable methods of use.

As of 2007, the company had nearly achieved its 2010 waste reduction goal of 25 percent from the 2005 baseline.

To continue on the path, teams are now determined to achieve 40 percent global waste reduction by 2010. When Celanese publishes its next Sustainability Report for the year 2008, we will communicate results from our recently developed Global Waste Reduction strategy.

Focus on global waste reduction enhances local performance
Our corporate EHS team helps Celanese sites worldwide identify and reduce their largest waste streams. The team serves as a conduit for best-practice sharing, helping shepherd waste-reduction solutions to sites worldwide. The EHS team continually monitors sites and prioritizes waste reduction projects beginning with the most significant waste generators. For example, in 2007 after determining a Celanese site in Mexico had a greater waste intensity than its peer sites in the United States, the EHS team analyzed methods and transferred more efficient processes to the Mexico site.

One process we are implementing is increased particle control. This control is not required by local regulation in Mexico, but is a best practice transfer from some of our U.S. sites. Its addition will contribute to significant cost reductions, reduced waste generation, and improved housekeeping.

“Our employees always want to do the right thing, so they welcome our help.” said Paul Dang, Celanese Waste/Wastewater leader. “They are excited to implement a project to achieve cost reductions for the company and also improve their workplace practices.”