RadiciGroup Meeting Its Targets

RadiciGroup Meeting Its Targets Roadmap to climate action: RadiciGroup has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent over the past decade. Target: -80 percent by 2030. Radici Chimica Novara plays a key role in reducing the Group's environmental impact. Setting concrete environmental sustainability targets to directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to benefit from investments and the latest technology. This is the approach that has always guided RadiciGroup, one of the companies setting direction for the sector, in operating a broad product range including chemical intermediates, polyamide polymers, high-performance engineering polymers and advanced textile solutions. RadiciGroup's strategy has borne fruit and enabled the company to achieve ambitious targets: between 2011 and 2020, the group company reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent, falling from approximately 700,000 mt CO2 equivalent annually to 200,000 mt. These results have been achieved in large part through actions implemented by RadiciGroup's Specialty Chemicals business unit at facilities in Novara, Italy and Germany—the heart of RadiciGroup's chemical operations. At these facilities, RadiciGroup produces a basic intermediate for synthesizing polyamide 66, adipic acid, which releases nitrous oxide as a by-product in the production process. Nitrous oxide is not inherently problematic (it is actually used in the medical sector as an anesthetic and in the food industry, for instance in whipped cream dispensers as a propellant), but it has a much higher greenhouse gas effect in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. At the Radici Chimica facility in Novara, a multi-year investment budget exceeding 10 million euros has been allocated to reducing these emissions through three major initiatives: First, in 2004, the commissioning of a three-bed catalytic reactor designed and patented by the company to decompose nitrous oxide. Here the nitrogen oxide is converted to nitrogen and oxygen—that is, back into the elements it originated from—which renders it harmless to the atmosphere. Second, in 2013, an EnviNOx facility was established to reduce nitrous oxide emissions arising in nitric acid production, and third, in 2021, further improvements were made to the emission reduction system associated with nitric acid production. Since the latest facility was activated just 9 months ago, more than 35,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent have been avoided. All of the actions mentioned above have enabled Radici Chimica Novara to record a nitrous oxide emission level below 10 ppm, a value approaching zero. Source