Orion's sustainability focus built into everyday business

LUXEMBOURG—Sustainability should be more than a buzzword. That's the way Orion Engineered Carbons sees it anyway. For sustainability to work, the company contends, its needs to be woven into the fabric of everyday business.

So Orion has set out to do just that.

"Our focus," said David Deters, Orion's senior vice president of innovation, "is on getting our sustainability fundamentals right by embedding sustainability into our management framework and incorporating sustainability into our business strategy."

In the company's 2019 sustainability report, Orion CEO Corning Painter noted that the company's efforts were recognized with a gold rating from EcoVadis, a provider of business sustainability ratings, intelligence and collaborative performance improvement tools for global supply chains.

Operationally, Orion has taken a variety of steps to improve sustainability. In 2019, the company invested $13 million to reduce nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions at sites in Qingdao, China, and Yeosu, South Korea. Both projects were completed last year, along with a project that upgraded the emissions control system at the company's Orange, Texas, facility.

Focus on products

Operations are just one part of the equation for Orion, which is looking to improve the sustainability of its products as well as those of the customers it serves.

"We see sustainability as an opportunity," Deters said in an email interview. "As a responsible carbon additive producer, offering sustainable products to our customers is a critical component of our strategy to drive sustainability across the full spectrum of our industry value chain."

For Orion, developing a more sustainable carbon black product means ensuring that the product is responsibly sourced and provides solutions that allow customers and end users to minimize their carbon footprints and extend the life of their products.

"Our focus areas are recycling carbon black, producing carbon black with renewable feedstock to offer 'green' carbon black, and offering carbon black that enables our customers to enhance their sustainability agenda," Deters said.

Orion's pursuit of alternative feedstocks, for instance, led to the development of Printex Nature, the company's first sustainable carbon black made from plant oil. The product has an array of uses, according to Deters, who noted that it can be used in printing inks, polymers and coatings.

"Building on this experience and knowhow, we are further exploring ways to produce carbon black from other renewable feedstocks as part of our effort to offer sustainable products to our customers," Deters said.

When it comes to sustainable innovation, Orion isn't achieving milestones alone. The company is embracing opportunities to expand its understanding of sustainable technology and developments by plugging into projects and initiatives that align with its goals.

The BlackCycle project is one example of that effort.

Funded through the European Union and launched in May 2020, the project brings public and private entities together around a focus of creating, developing and optimizing a circular economy for tires.

"As the only carbon black producer in the consortium, our main role is to evaluate the feasibility of using pyrolysis oil in the production of carbon black," Deters said. "As part of this work, we will assess the chemical properties of pyrolysis oil and their usability as carbon black feedstock, as well as the applicability of carbon black produced from pyrolysis oil as an additive in tire and other production processes.

"If the test results are positive," Deters said, "it will take the carbon black industry one step closer to a circular economy."

Orion also is partnering with RI.SE ETC (Research Institutes of Sweden—Energy Technology Center) to develop sustainable carbon blacks from renewable raw materials from Swedish forests. This publicly funded project began this year and is set to continue through 2024.

'Green' tires

The carbon black maker also continues to invest in products that offer sustainable solutions to customers and end-users.

Deters pointed to Orion's Ecorax line of products such as Ecorax S 204 and Ecorax S 470, which are designed to help tires maximize performance by improving rolling resistance, which ultimately leads to fuel conservation and reduced emissions.

Other products in the Ecorax line include Ecorax S 206, which reduces air permeability to help ensure proper tire inflation, and Ecorax S 600, which enables reduced rolling resistance and wear resistance. In both instances, the products help motorists maximize the life of their tires, save on fuel costs and reduce emissions.

Commitments, like the one Orion has made regarding sustainability, aren't supposed to waiver when challenges arise. The company contends that was the case in the last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic tightened demand and weighed heavily on the bottom line.

"The challenges we faced by the COVID-19 pandemic impact are unlikely to be unique to Orion," Deters said. "As our quarterly earnings announcements show, we faced periods of demand depression that affected our earnings. One conscious decision we made during this time was to walk our talk."

Walking the talk, he added, meant sticking to the commitments Orion made to communities in which it has a presence. It did this by ensuring communities had access to personal protective equipment when shortages emerged and never pulled back on the investments it was making in upgrades to emissions control systems, completing the projects in China, South Korea and Texas in the process.

It's all of these efforts together that Orion believes will help it achieve its greatest sustainability aims. Building them into the framework of everyday business ultimately is what will set the company up for success.

"Advancing sustainability," Painter said in the company's most recent sustainability report, "requires transitioning away from 'business as usual' and adapting to a changing business environment to deliver value to stakeholders on a sustainable basis over the longer term."