Environment

Our quality and environmental policy strives for the smallest environmental footprint possible. Our responsibility towards the planet and people is incorporated in our strategy, values and culture. That’s why we continuously monitor and measure our environmental performance: we want to improve our results year after year.

Low environmental impact: ISO14001

Melexis is defined as a company with a low environmental impact by ISO 14001 certification rules. Our main production process is testing, so we don’t use chemical or hazardous substances in our production sites. But we don’t stop there. Following the precautionary principle, we identify, assess and mitigate risks for the environment. Our internal requirements are often more stringent than applicable laws and guidelines.

Five guiding principles

Melexis’ quality and environmental policy is based on five principles

• Sustainable development: we develop products and processes that have a minimal impact on the environment,now and in the future.
• Prevention is better than cure: we design products that are ‘safe at launch’ and ‘first time right’, maximizing the value of the effort and materials used.
• Total environmental impact counts: production (including energy consumption), use and end-of-life disposal have as little effect as possible on the environment.
• Open dialogue with all stakeholders: everything we do contributes to our corporate social responsibility, with team members playing an active part. This positive attitude helps determine the financial and technological success of our company. We are proud of our daily efforts to produce less waste, improve efficiency and contribute to a sustainable future.
• Zero incidents: throughout the entire supply chain and life cycle of our products, we ensure robust competitive processes that continuously reduce incident occurrence and enhance incident detection.

Resource use: energy, materials, emissions and waste

Reducing our environmental impact, is circling around the reduction of energy consumption, material use, emissions and waste.

Energy reduction is realized by different initiatives. We replace old equipment with new, energy efficient machines. We install charging stations for EVs and new chillers for ACs. A new, state of the art building in Sofia will further reduce our energy consumption thanks to all kinds of modern technologies. In our site in Bevaix we will install 300 m² of solar panels.

As a result, in our production sites in Erfurt, Sofia and Ieper alone, we reduced our energy consumption from 27008 megawatt hour in 2018 to 26418 megawatt hour in 2020.

The same goes for our material use. Thanks to our policies, the raw material use went from 90.96 ton in 2018 to 83.7 tons in 2020. All this while increasing our production. Our emissions and waste went down as well. Where we still had 11.479 tons of CO2 emissions in 2018, Melexis reduced that to 10.394 tons in 2020. In the same period waste disposal went down from 256 tons to 216 tons.

Environmental performance data

Melexis collects its environmental impact data and publishes them each year. The table below indicates the use of materials by Melexis and its suppliers, the energy and water use, CO2 emissions and waste disposal.

Supplier social and environmental assessment

Suppliers and subcontractors are a crucial element of our environmental program. We require them to act environmentally responsible. They must have their own environmental policy, system and continuous improvement plans. We request environmental information records on all materials supplied to Melexis. We only allow companies with an ISO 14001 certification when selecting suppliers.

Key suppliers must sign a quality agreement. Basically this agreement asks the same commitment to sustainability as is shown by Melexis.

Internal testing

Besides annual external tests, all our products are tested internally during every stage of their development. We look for flaws with a negative impact on health and safety. Thanks to this extensive external and internal testing procedure, we can issue product declarations and safety data sheets to inform our customers about the safety of our solutions.

REACH and SVHC

Melexis is not required to register its products under the REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) Regulation EC/1907/2006. Nevertheless, Melexis aims to achieve the REACH goals, meaning that all products supplied to Melexis’ customers do not contain any of the substances in the Candidate List of Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC). Also included are the new substances announced by ECHA (European Chemical Agency) on 15 January 2018. Melexis also acknowledges Annex XVII of REACH regulation and confirms the absence of those substances too. In short, we can attest that we are compliant with ROHS, REACH, the conflict minerals requirements (e.g. based on Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act), ELV/WEEE and any other local legal requirements and requests.