Nobian is a European leader in the production of essential chemicals mainly based on the chlorine value chain, with production sites in western Europe. Nobian was previously part of AkzoNobel and has a long track-record in working on their sustainability performance. In order to address their ambition to define their carbon footprint baseline and targets for 2025/2030, Nobian wanted to understand how their carbon footprint developed since 1990. Therefore they asked Ecomatters to support them in calculating the carbon emissions in the years 1990 and 2020 for their production sites. In addition, the project aimed to deliver results that could be communicated to both internal and external stakeholders.

The first step was to define the scope of the study. For this purpose, Ecomatters organised meetings with the sites in order to map out the status of the changes in the sites for the years 1990 and 2020. Based on the discussions and understanding of the available data, a calculation approach was developed. Upon the completion of the calculations, the results were validated with each of the production sites.

Although it was needed to find data in the archives to perform the calculations, the sites had good insights on their (energy) consumption from 30 years earlier. Not only were we able to finalize the calculations, the outcome was that since 1990 the total carbon footprint was reduced by approximately 30% while the production has overall slightly increased. Therefore, showing the commitment of Nobian to sustainability. Furthermore, the analysis of the calculations helped with highlighting the hotspots and potential points to improve.

Ecomatters was happy to work with Nobian to look into their historic performance and is glad to support Nobian with realising their sustainability vision.