Siemens and BayWa advance CO2-optimized production
The technology company Siemens and BayWa AG are working together to advance CO2-optimized industrial production. As part of a pilot project, the two companies are combining Sigreen, Siemens’ software for emissions management, with BayWa Carbon Connect, BayWa’s software for emissions offsetting.
In the future, this will help industrial enterprises understand product-specific emissions across the supply chain and all the way to their offsetting. The first step is identification of a product’s real carbon footprint across the supply chain using Sigreen, after which measures are derived for avoiding CO2 and, finally, emissions that are currently unavoidable are offset by purchasing CO2 certificates from trusted climate protection projects via BayWa Carbon Connect. Only projects that store CO2 – for example, in biomass or humus – are selected for the joint pilot project.
Uniform quality standards for climate protection projects
The combination of the two software solutions will make it possible to forward information on emissions offsetting projects across the supply chain to other companies without restricting the data sovereignty of suppliers and sub-suppliers. This provides a digital means for defining and incorporating uniform quality standards for emissions offsetting projects within a company’s own supply chain. In the future, this will inform manufacturers of whether their suppliers’ products have been offset and with what projects.
“The declared vision of this joint pilot project is a consistent, end-to-end process that is reliable and certified, from the generation of unavoidable carbon emissions to the ultimate removal of these emissions from the atmosphere,” says Dr. Gunter Beitinger, SVP Manufacturing, Factory Digitalization and Sigreen at Siemens and Chairperson of the Estainium Association.
“Until now, the lack of transparency has meant that companies have been unable to fully trust the neutralization and compensation measures of their own supply chain. I believe that by combining BayWa Carbon Connect and Sigreen, we’ve paved the way for uniform quality standards within the supply chain, and in this way have taken an important transformative step toward credible emissions offsetting in industry,” says Steffen Winkler, Business Unit Lead of IT Products and Services at BayWa AG and Head of BayWa Carbon Services.
First specific use case at the Siemens factory in Amberg
Siemens is presenting a specific use case based on its own production in Amberg, Germany: For the duration of the project – from January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023 – the company is offsetting the carbon emissions that have been generated by the production of selected products from the Simatic S7-1500 controller family. This takes into account emissions from the supply chain to the factory gate (“cradle-to-gate”). During the period from 2015 to 2022, the Electronics Works Amberg demonstrably reduced its CO2 by 49 percent and set its sights on becoming CO2-neutral by 2026. A variety of measures are being used to reduce emissions from the supply chain. For example, Siemens is relying on the use of sustainable materials and on cooperation with suppliers to reduce product-specific carbon footprints. In 2023, the factory received the Sustainability Award from the World Economic Forum.
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