Sustainability is an integral part of our business at Fermion and we are delighted to share our mother company’s Orion’s Sustainability Report for 2023. Highlights of the report include the increased level of ambition in environmental responsibility where Fermion plays an important role.
Most of the Orion Group’s waste is hazardous, and most of it comes from Fermion, due to the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients at our plants in Hanko and Oulu using synthetic methods of organic chemistry, as well as our handling of large quantities of raw materials. Therefore, pollution control is one of our most important areas of environmental management .
We know the quality of our wastewater, and we are fully committed to reducing the environmental burden on waterways caused by our operational facilities by minimising the residues of harmful chemicals in our wastewater The non-collectable wastewater from our own operations is directed to municipal wastewater treatment plants either directly or after neutralisation. The wastewater leaving the process areas of Fermion’s Hanko plant is treated in our partner’s adjacent biological wastewater treatment plant, from where the treated water is directed to the sea via the local municipal discharge pipe. In Hanko, we feed distilled ethanol streams to the released process wastewater, which increases the efficiency of the microbial activity in the treatment process, and thus reduces nitrogen emissions to natural waterways.
Our most material air emissions are volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, which we control in our operations. In Oulu, VOC emissions are treated in a facility that operates according to cryogenic principles, and the vaporised solvents are recondensed into liquid form with the help of liquid nitrogen. In Hanko, VOC emissions are treated by our partner in a VOC treatment plant by incinerating them to create energy.