Minimizing our environmental impact
All activities leave a footprint on nature and climate. We work in various ways across the business to reduce our impact.
LM Wind Power is part of the green energy industry with more than 150,800 blades produced since the late 1970s. However, manufacturing, assembling and transporting them require resources and energy, and produces waste. We are committed to improving how we manage the environmental impact through the entire lifecycle of our products and services and in 2010 we started mapping our carbon footprint in all parts of the group.
We are looking at the environmental aspects of the following areas:
- Material consumption
- Energy consumption
- Water consumption
- Waste generation and handling
- Product end of life
- Business travel
We work internally and with our suppliers on optimizing our material consumption to cut waste and cost. This includes implementing initiatives to reduce, re-use and replace hazardous materials in our manufacturing. During 2011, all sites have gone through an energy audit.
We also track our water consumption. Even though the wind industry is one of the industries for power generation that consumes the least water and we don’t use water in our production processes, we recognize that water is and will be an increasingly scarce resource that we all need to take responsibility for preserving.
As a global company travel is a needed and important. However, our travel policy aims at reducing this to a minimum to keep the environmental impact and cost down. This is also one of the parameters we track as part of our corporate carbon footprint.
Disposing of blades several meters long is a challenge that will become increasingly imminent. We have engaged in a cooperation with a supplier of a blade disposal solution that through combustion turns the blade into fuel for power generation. Long term, we are aiming for a recycling solution and continuously support research in more environmentally friendly technologies.