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Product Responsibility

We want our products to be safe over their full life cycle and while being used as intended – from research, production, marketing and use by customers to disposal.

Management
Approach

Our Group-wide corporate policy is the top-most guideline for our activity. It calls for an improvement of production processes, products and services in a continual process that is built on the knowledge, responsibility and experience of our employees and is supported by our training and education program.
The most important tool here for the implementation is the integrated management system with its safety and risk man-agement system. The management handbook for the IMS also applies Group-wide and is available to all employees in multiple languages via our document database DokWeb.


zero-error approach

We pursue a zero-error approach in terms of our product responsibility and the quality of our products. Production is thus regulated by a number of instructions in the individual organizational units and is managed at each location by the employees in production. The production processes in use are commonly used processes that are in line with the state of technology in the petroleum-processing industry. These are processes for distillation, extraction, deparaffination, hy-dration, formulation and filling processes. The instructions for these processes describe in adequate detail the steps of the activities in the individual organizational units as well as the corresponding interfaces and handover points. They also indicate specific product characteristics, the settings for machinery parameters, carrying out tests and how to handle faulty products. The instructions are on display at the em-ployees’ workspaces or are also available electronically via DokWeb.


Code of Conduct

Our code of conduct additionally reminds our entire orga-nization to design our production processes and processing plants in such a way that they conserve resources – as a sign of our respect for the environment, the community, our busi-ness partners and our employees. We utilize the environmen-tal media of air, water and soil in our activities only with prior approval and construct or operate our production facilities in accordance with these previously granted legal stipulations.


Legal Framework

The relevant legal frameworks for ensuring safe products are the legislation on chemicals and dangerous substances as well as REACH (the European Regulation on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) and apply to the raw materials processing production units of the H&R Group.

Validierung

All processes for production and providing services are vali-dated before approval is given for serial production or before the service is provided. This includes:
• Qualification of processes
• Qualification of equipment and employees 
• Use of defined methods and processes
• Required recordings
• Renewed validation

The goal is to ensure that the resultant product or the process is able to fulfill the requirements (including customer requirements) for the intended application or use. If the cus-tomer wishes, we use approved processes for production process and product approval such as VDA Volume 2, PPF processes and initial sample test report or PPAP based on IATF 16949.


Guarantee

The most important instrument in ensuring that these are adhered to is the position of the officer for product safety. These officers examine the scope and execution of relevant process-es and therefore additionally ensure that laws, provisions, audit obligations and regulations are adhered to.
In addition, the product safety officer instructs employees on matters relevant to chemicals legislation. The officers report on their activities, which is then provided to the Executive Board.
For 2021, we are not aware of violations of legal provisions, requirements or labeling obligations.
However, we cannot fully rule out the risks inherent in operat-ing industrial plants (including risks arising from our refiner-ies and our products). To ensure that both the sites and their neighbors are protected, we operate our own firefighting crew at our locations and/or are in close contact with the local emergency teams. Regular drills ensure smooth cooperation.

Safety and Environmental
Compatibility of Products

H&R differentiates between core products and by-products or combustion products. We have set ourselves the goal of hav-ing 70% our core products produced sustainably by 2030, i.e., based on bio-based, synthesized or renewable raw mate-rials and to include our customers in this process in a timely manner. In this way, we define together what exactly is need-ed with which product characteristics. Once these questions are clarified, new products are introduced to the market.
The business area in which H&R operates, the production of hydrocarbon-based specialty products, is a very particular one. Our products are needed in a wide variety of sectors. This makes it all the more important for us to live up to our responsibility toward the environment and our neighbors, as well as our business partners and employees, and to man-ufacture products that are safe to use and are also as envi-ronmentally friendly as possible. The conservation of natural resources and the use of environmentally friendly and safe production processes that save energy are an absolute must. This is why, throughout the H&R Group, it is the joint respon-sibility of all employees to constantly search for opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of our processes, prod-ucts and services, as well as the environmental impact within their own working environment. H&R operates a comprehen-sive improvement management system. In addition, we mod-ernize our manufacturing processes and processing plants and, in the case of the hydrogen electrolysis plant or the pow-er-to-liquids plant, add new technologies to the plant set-up.

Our products are used in a vast range of industries and in almost all areas of day-to-day life, for example, in the food and packaging industries, but also in the cosmetics and pharmaceutical sectors. In the food industry, for example, cheese rinds are coated with paraffin to prevent the cheese from drying out. The packaging industry has various uses for paraffins, including coating the inside of Tetra Pak contain-ers. Medical white oils are used in cosmetic products such as creams and ointments. Since our products also come into direct contact with people in the end products in which they are used, it is particularly important that they are harmless and non-hazardous to health over their entire life cycle.

Would you like to find out more? Then read the full article in our Sustainability Report 2022

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