Environmentally friendly waste management
EVN’s waste management is organised in accordance with the respective national and European waste management laws and related directives. Company guidelines regulate, in particular, the collection, storage, disposal and documentation of hazardous as well as non-hazardous waste. We see the separation of waste not only as a legal obligation but also as an active contribution to environmental protection.
We installed standardised waste collection centres at all EVN locations in Lower Austria already in the early 1990s to ensure the correct separation and collection of waste and installed special software to electronically record waste-related data. This solution was subsequently rolled out in all countries of EVN Group. Separated waste is – both technically and economically – easier to reuse or recycle. All our locations – from the offices to generation plants – use separation systems with coloured coding for the various waste categories. Separation requirements and mixing bans are also in place at construction sites. The disposal of waste, depending on the category, must be verified and documented. Detailed instructions have been issued to ensure correct disposal, especially for hazardous waste. Our material and equipment suppliers as well as our disposal partners are selected according to ecological criteria whenever possible.
The Austrian Waste Management Act requires companies or locations with more than 100 employees to designate a waste officer and to file his or her contact data with the responsible authority. EVN meets this requirement with a central waste officer who is assigned to the innovation, sustainability and environmental protection department which reports directly to the Executive Board. In close cooperation with this central officer, the waste management representatives at the various locations and corporate units ensure the implementation and organisation of local waste management concepts which are updated, depending on the country, at the latest every seven years. As a precaution and in the interest of sustainability, we follow the goals listed below in keeping with national and European waste management laws:
- Prevent damaging or negative effects on people and the environment or minimise these effects as far as possible
- Minimise the emission of air pollutants and climate-relevant gases as far as possible
- Conserve resources, e.g. raw materials, water, energy and land
- Minimise waste and its hazardous content as far as possible
- Recycle waste whenever possible and reasonable
- Treat non-recyclable waste according to its properties and store solid residual amounts correctly
EVN’s waste management also regulates the handling of environmentally relevant incidents through business instructions which define, for example, the necessary steps to take and the information to be supplied to the authorities in the event there is uncontrolled leakage of environmentally hazardous liquids. We record all types of environmentally relevant incidents in a standardised reporting system that covers all facilities in Austria, Germany, Bulgaria and North Macedonia. Moreover, our annual integrated EVN Full Report includes details on waste volumes and reportable environmental incidents.
Our waste management system is continuously optimised along the lines of the circular economy. In accordance with the principles of the Austrian Waste Management Act, our actions are based on the following cycle:
Consistent with the principles of the circular economy, waste in our company is increasingly shifting from a disposal problem to a raw material issue. Waste management as a business field optimally complements EVN’s service portfolio. Our thermal waste utilisation plant in Zwentendorf/Dürnrohr offers ecologically reasonable, low-cost solutions and creates a modern waste utilisation infrastructure for Lower Austria. In agreement with the “waste to energy“ principle, this plant has processed more than 500,000 tonnes of household and bulky waste as well as non-hazardous commercial and industrial waste per year since January 2004.