Sustainability at Hamm

Aerial view of the Hamm plant in Tirschenreuth

Conserving resources

At Hamm, sustainability is deeply entrenched in every business area and every process – from Procurement to Development and even Spare Parts Service.

“We see environmental protection as absolutely indispensable. This applies not only to our operations as a manufacturing company, but also to our products. It is also a matter of identifying further potential for improvement through our environmental management system, which will enable us to reduce our consumption of resources and energy on site and to further reduce our impact on the environment."

Dr Stefan Klumpp, Chief Technology Officer, Hamm AG

Certified to ISO 14001

Keeping the soil, air and water clean is part of our company philosophy. Further to this, use of recycled materials in all sectors is conserving a lot of resources and energy. It is against this backdrop that Hamm established an environmental management system at its main Tirschenreuth plant and has been certified to ISO 14001 standard since November 2020. In doing so, Hamm has pledged to keep on working to reduce its emissions and its consumption of resources. In connection with this, Hamm also maintains a record of all environmental laws and provisions relating to waste disposal, solvents, air quality, noise and water protection, and can monitor its compliance with these. To firmly entrench these responsibilities within the company, Hamm employs an Environmental Management Officer and an Energy Officer.

Plant Manager Dirk Pressgott and Environmental Management Officer Marcus Rahm

The certificate is testament to the fact that Hamm is continually optimising its own environmental performance.

The Hamm Environmental Management team

Plant Manager Dirk Pressgott and Environmental Management Officer Marcus Rahm

Considerate handling of resources

Another important factor in how resources are handled is the employees’ awareness of the matter. This is why staff have taken regular training courses for many years now – looking at how to prevent materials and energy being wasted.

Less waste, more recycling

One indicator of a gentle approach to available resources is the amount of waste produced. In light of this, the teams from Logistics, Procurement and Production Planning implement a wide range of measures. For instance, we have worked with various logistics providers to significantly reduce the transport packaging.

Hamm is also looking at its water consumption. This has been dramatically reduced in recent years in collaboration with the manufacturer of the machining centres on which the drums are mechanically machined.

Less dramatic measures are also helping the cause

For instance, Hamm has done away with single-use cleaning cloths in Production, and uses an environmentally friendly reusable system instead. More generally, all departments are utilising every opportunity for a circular economy. This includes separating out any currently non-recyclable waste as effectively as possible and collecting this in residual material containers. In the end, only around 6% of the residual material ends up in the residual waste.

Image to right: Inside the plant are clearly labelled containers for the most effective possible separation of waste.

Paperless production

Hamm is also endeavouring to make production paperless. The company has made great strides forward in this regard. When it comes to documentation for the machinery too, the roller manufacturer has also turned to electronic documents in lieu of paper. Customers can still request a printed instruction manual, if preferred. But with the “print on demand” scheme in place, only that which is really needed gets printed. Consequently, Hamm has been able to reduce the number of printed pages by over 60% in recent years.

Considerate handling of paints and oils – including throughout the supply chain

The paints used in production are still only low in solvent on the whole. In collaboration with the suppliers, the proportion of solvent used in the paint has also been reduced in recent years. Furthermore, paint robots and an automatic conveyor system help to keep the painting process low in solvent emissions.

Hamm is also setting high standards of its subcontractors and all companies that dispose of waste, residual paint, oils and other materials that need to be handled with care. This way, Procurement is considering the sustainability of the materials and the environmental certifications of the companies, and regularly audits the environmental measures of its suppliers and service providers.

Monitors instead of notes: Information flows along the assembly lines in electronic form.

Paint robots and an automatic conveyor system help to keep the solvent emissions from painting at a low level.

Monitors to display the flow of information on the assembly line

Sustainable spare parts service

Sustainability even permeates the way we dispatch spare parts: For instance, most parts are still available well beyond the global standard minimum time limit of 10 years after purchase of the machine. This means that even rollers that are decades old can be repaired and operated with a high level of availability. What’s more, the spare parts issued today – including those intended for older models – still meet modern-day requirements in terms of environmental protection.

And that’s not all: Hamm not only supplies spare parts in the form of complete assemblies, but also as individual parts. This too saves resources and maximises dispatch capacity.

Goodbye to film and plastic

As far as is possible, Hamm is abstaining from films and plastic when dispatching spare parts. The company is committed to using cardboard rather than plastic to package the parts, and polystyrene chips are a taboo filling material. Instead, paper is used as a filling material and padding.

Image left: Paper packaging in spare part dispatch

Sustainable training concepts

For a long time, the only option for training service teams and sales teams around the world was in-person events alongside books and videos. For globally operating companies such as Hamm, that meant high resource consumption for training materials as well as a lot of travel. To conserve resources, e.g. for paper, and reduce emissions, Hamm has been breaking new ground ever since 2011.

To train sales and service employees around the world, and for internal training courses, Hamm uses a range of digital solutions. With its eTraining programme, an exclusively digital online tool, many training courses are completely paperless. Plus, many product training courses are conducted in the form of video streams. This has a particularly major impact on the environmental footprint; after all, transporting just one trainer from central Europe to south-east Asia and back, for instance, produces as many emissions as the average global citizen produces in a whole year.

Professional equipment is used to facilitate interactive training courses on the machines.

With the latest technology, worldwide training courses are possible.

During the eTraining course, participants get a live impression of the machine.

interactive training courses on the machines

Saving resources in machine development

The considerate handling of resources is also a recurring theme in machine development. In this respect, the teams take care to ensure that material consumption of the manufacturing process stays low, among other factors. A good example is the optimisation of the metal plate cuttings. Thanks to intelligent design and modern machining processes, the plates are used as efficiently as possible in order to keep offcuts to a minimum.

Image left: Cutting plan for side panels

Continuous process optimisation

All these measures have enabled Hamm to dramatically increase its environmental performance in recent years. As an ISO 14001 certified company, the roller manufacturer will keep working to reduce its emissions and consumption of resources further in future – both within the production process and for the product life and service life of the machine.