Protecting the environment is part of our social responsibility. It is a key element of our business strategy which aims to promote long-term growth in enterprise value. We want to make a positive contribution to a secure and sustainable future by improving our own environmental performance and encouraging our staff, suppliers, and customers to do the same. The optimization and development of our processes and organizational structure lie at the center of our endeavors. Our aim is to manufacture our products as safely as possible, using a minimum of resources.

Environmental Management Systems.
Wincor Nixdorf has implemented an environmental management system that is regularly audited by the German Association for the Certification of Management Systems (DQS) in line with DIN EN ISO 14001. We use this system to implement our environmental policies and to optimize all our processes with a view to improving the environmental performance of our company.

Reducing Emissions of Climate-changing Substances.
Under the terms of the Kyoto Protocol, the EU is obliged to reduce its emissions of climate-changing substances. To help achieve this goal, we have been running a modern co-generation plant at our Paderborn site for some years. The plant is based on combined heat and power (CHP) and saves around 5,000 tons of CO₂ per year. We are also involved in emissions trading.

Compliance with Statutory Environmental Protection Regulations.
A key aspect of our environmental activity is for example the implementation of European Directives on the return and disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and the restricted use of certain environmentally hazardous substances in new electronic equipment (RoHS). In the year under review, we made considerable efforts to implement as quickly as possible a series of measures that will help protect the environment.

Sustainable Products.
Our responsibility to the environment applies not only to the production process but also to the entire lifecycle of our products – from development and production to operation and, ultimately, recycling. Right at the development stage we make every effort to manufacture products with a long life-cycle, avoid the use of damaging substances, reduce the number of materials used, and, wherever possible, recycle them. To the extent that decommissioned machines or devices cannot be reused as complete systems, we aim to remove components and assemblies in order to reuse them as spare parts.