In July, Heraeus Precious Metals will publish its Sustainability Update 2025, providing an overview of the company's progress across environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics.
Ahead of its publication, we spoke with Sarah Huth, who took over as Head of Sustainability and Responsible Sourcing in April, about the company's climate journey over the past years.
At the End of 2025, Where Does Heraeus Precious Metals Stand in Its Climate Ambitions?
We have made significant progress. Since 2019, we have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from our own operations, that’s our Scope 1 and market-based Scope 2 emissions, by 64%. We have also successfully reached our goal of sourcing 100% renewable electricity worldwide.
At the same time, we did not achieve every milestone we had set for ourselves. We aimed for an energy consumption reduction of 20% compared to 2019. We reduced our energy consumption by 11%. If we exclude the growth of our production, we made it to almost 20%. Of course, we would have liked to go further. Ambitious targets are intended to push an organization forward. Looking back, they helped drive significant improvements and accelerate change across our operations.
What Have Been the Biggest Learnings?
When we set these targets in 2021, we deliberately aimed high. And in fact, they created the intended momentum and helped us achieve remarkable progress rather quickly.
The past years have also shown how dynamically regulatory requirements, expectations and best practices around sustainability evolve. This makes constant reflection and adaptation necessary.
In 2024 for example, we decided to no longer pursue the target to become carbon neutral by the end of 2025 through offsets. The public debate on offsets had shown that proper handling would have required more capacity on the topic than originally anticipated. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was necessary to reflect on where we put our resources and capacities going forward. Our mission has not changed: we strive to make genuine progress in reducing emissions.
Where Does Heraeus Precious Metals Stand in Terms of Emissions Resulting From Its Supply Chain?
More than 99% of our total greenhouse gas emissions result from our value chain. The biggest driver of our Scope 3 emissions is the purchase of precious metals. Reducing these indirect emissions is by far more challenging than addressing emissions in our own operations. In order to effectively reduce those emissions, we have been working on improving our data basis. The better we understand mine-specific emissions and reduction potentials, the better can we manage our relationships with mines. Another lever is increasing our secondary precious metal volumes.
By the end of 2025, our Scope 3 emissions reduced by more than 30% compared to 2020. A relevant part of the reduction comes from the mentioned levers. To a lesser extent, this development is also caused by volume effects and an adjustment to our Scope 3 accounting methodology toward mine-specific emission factors.
Our upcoming Sustainability Update will talk about these and further ESG-relevant developments in more detail.
