Kraton is committed to continuously improving the environmental stewardship of our operations. Our environmental management program ensures our facilities’ compliance with applicable environmental requirements. We work to increase resource efficiency by
We continue to improve our operations’ energy efficiency and reduce consumption. We invest in more energy-efficient technologies and implement energy management systems at our sites. Beyond reducing GHG emissions, we work to reduce our air emissions, such as reducing leaks and losses from mechanical equipment.
Our Sandarne and Oulu plants continue to reduce fossil fuels in their production process. Sandarne developed a mixture of purified pitch fuel – obtained from our distillation process – to run the heaters at the plant. It is now a sustainable fuel powering normal operations, and fossil fuels are only needed to start up and shut down the process. This process improvement enable us to further reduce the use of heavy fuel oil and allow us to run the steam boiler and heaters with our operations’ own by-products – increasing our resource efficiency as we discover new ways to use every part of the crude tall oil (CTO).
We are committed to keeping our waters clean and safe. Most Kraton plants are located near a water source, and we take extra measures to eliminate risks of impacting them. We work to decrease water consumption by improving our site processes. We invest extensively to build new and upgrade existing secondary containment structures that adhere to company-wide standards and local regulations. We also put efforts into mitigating the risk of pollutants reaching the environment, such as by installing detectors at various critical points.
We continue to improve processes and reduce generation of process residuals. We practice effective waste management and waste minimization including:
Kraton seeks to make the most of our waste streams by considering options to reuse the materials waste or recycling it at qualified third parties. For example, we send our byproducts to a cement kiln for energy recovery. This practice allows us to avoid sending this hazardous waste for incineration, and instead makes use of our byproduct’s valuable energy content. Another example is recovering and reusing solvent onsite. Solvents are used in our polymer production, but they are not consumed in the reaction – making solvent recovery a viable option.