SIEMENS

Environmental protection has played a prominent role at Siemens for 40 years. “There has been a central Environmental Protection office at Siemens since 1971,” says Dr. Wolfgang Bloch, who heads the department. Its mission is to make products as environmentally compatible as possible. But what’s involved in ensuring that a plant consumes as few resources as possible, that a product doesn’t contain any harmful substances, and that recycling works?

The answer is provided by SN 36350, a Siemens internal standard governing Environmentally Compatible Products and Facilities. The standard is binding for all Siemens developers. The first edition of this standard, which was drafted back in 1993, was prompted by the extensive debate in Germany at the time concerning a requirement for manufacturers and suppliers to take back old electronic devices. At first, the standard was focused primarily on unwanted and prohibited substances. It soon became clear, however, that the simplest possible design is a key factor for the success of any recycling effort. The fewer individual materials and components a product contains, the easier it is to re-use its materials.

“Resource and energy efficiency has become more important in recent years,” says Bloch. The standard even served as the basis for IEC 62430 (Environmentally Conscious Design for Electrical and Electronic Products), which was issued in 2009 by the International Electrotechnical Commission. According to Bloch, this standard is non-binding but reflects the worldwide state of the art. There was nothing comparable to it prior to 2009, but today numerous companies apply the standard. “Siemens was a pioneer in environmentally compatible product design,” says Bloch.

SN 36350 includes principles for handling hazardous materials and for environmentally compatible packaging, as well as an Environmental Product Declaration. Other important elements are a 20-item list with guidelines for environmentally compatible product design and 12 plant-related rules — all of which take the entire life cycle into account. According to the standard, developers should work to ensure that as little waste as possible is generated and that recyclable materials or renewable raw materials are used. In addition, products should be easy to repair, have a long service life, and be easy to dismantle.

Production plants should also be built using environmentally compatible materials. They should generate minimum noise, exhaust gases, and waste, and be suitable for retrofitting. “Developers must internalize these principles to get the most out of them,” says Johann Russinger, Environmental Officer at Siemens Healthcare. They must also consider a product’s schedule, budget, quality requirements, and function, which is why Siemens Healthcare has adapted SN 36350 to the specific requirements of medical devices and fully integrated it into its development process.

This systematic approach has resulted in some remarkable success stories, such as the Somatom Definition Flash computed tomography (CT) scanner. On the market since 2009, it is the only scanner with two X-ray sources and two detectors. This makes the scanner particularly easy on patients. Cardiac examinations take less than a second, for instance. That makes it much easier to examine small children and babies because it eliminates the need to put them under full narcosis while being examined. “The previous model, the Somatom Definition, won the Siemens Environmental Award,” reports Russinger. “Even we were surprised that further improvement was possible.”

Concrete environmental objectives were defined in the planning stage. For the Somatom Definition Flash, these objectives concerned the radiation dose, energy consumption, and hazardous substances. For instance, the new model was designed to use considerably less lead than its predecessor. The scanner’s development team met all three objectives. Radiation dose for a cardiac examination, for instance, was reduced by 70 percent. A number of tricks were used to accomplish this. For one thing, the body is scanned very quickly. The dual X-ray sources, which can even be operated with different spectrums, greatly improve image quality without increasing radiation dose. And the scanner is ECG-triggered, which means it records its images during precisely those fractions of a second in which the heart is barely moving. The radiation dose is also intelligently regulated. Sensitive areas such as the thyroid and the female breast aren’t exposed to any direct radiation, and improved analysis software further reduces the dose.

Energy consumption dropped in conjunction with the reduced dose. Depending on the type of examination, the scanner uses between 45 and 85 percent less energy than the previous model. Developers couldn’t completely eliminate the lead shielding because the heavy metal is needed to protect patients against unnecessary X-ray radiation. They did, however, succeed in reducing some of the lead in the X-ray shield by using bronze instead, lowering the lead content from 5.26 to 1.45 kilograms.

Recycling is also crucial. “Ninety-seven percent of the materials can be re-used,” says Russinger. To make it easier to cleanly separate them, the materials are recorded and plastic parts are precisely marked. Up to 60 percent of the materials are re-used in new devices. Russinger admits such environmental factors don’t play a decisive role in customers’ decisions; after all, the most important thing in medicine is a good diagnosis. “But these aspects are becoming more important. With two otherwise equivalent devices, energy consumption can affect decisions,” he says. Lower resource use can also be advantageous in terms of transport costs and space requirements.

Cutting Emissions by 90 Percent. Well-planned environmental protection measures also deliver economic advantages. Take the new exhaust gas treatment technology from Siemens VAI Metals Technologies in Linz, Austria, for example. Together with voestalpine Stahl, a team led by Dr. Alexander Fleischanderl at Siemens Industry Solutions succeeded in reducing harmful emissions from a sinter plant by more than 90 percent, while also saving energy, an achievement that was honored with the 2011 Siemens Environmental Award.

Sinter plants are an important component of steel mills. This is where finely-ground iron ore is burned and melted into larger chunks — sintered, as experts say — before it’s fed into a blast furnace. The exhaust gas of a sinter plant contains numerous pollutants: sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, particulates, heavy metals, and organic compounds. To reduce these emissions, developers combined two groundbreaking technologies in 2005.

First, they used exhaust gas recirculation to reduce the volume of exhaust gas by as much as 40 percent. The hottest portion of the exhaust gas is returned to the plant. Carbon monoxide and other pollutants in the exhaust gas, such as dioxins, are combusted during the second pass through the plant, and some of the sulfur dioxide and particulates are bound in the sinter layer. Exhaust gas recirculation also helps to save energy because the exhaust gas is already hot and doesn’t have to be preheated with air as usual. It also reduces the amount of exhaust gas, which subsequently needs to be made free of the remaining pollutants in a special reactor.

Developers opted for “dry processes,” which, unlike conventional gas cleaning processes, require no water. This approach not only reduces energy consumption; it also cleans the exhaust gas more effectively because it combines multiple process steps, including filtration, adsorption, and particulate recirculation. “Emissions are lower by a factor of ten compared to wet processes,” reports Robert Neuhold, a product life cycle manager at Siemens VAI.

Environmental protection measures pay off for customers. An analysis was performed using the Eco-Care Matrix, a new tool for product-related environmental protection that considers economic and environmental factors (see article “When is Green Really Green”). The findings show that for a plant producing 2.8 million metric tons of sinter annually, energy costs are reduced by €5 million per year compared to the figure for conventional exhaust gas treatment technology.

Bloch and his colleagues are constantly working to refine the SN 36350 standard. “We are now in the process of integrating the guidelines laid out in the standard into the project management process,” he says. In addition, Web-based training will be made available to Siemens developers in the future — to ensure that environmental protection becomes as integrated in their mindsets as cost efficiency and quality management.