Driving Sustainability

We support industrial customers with solutions for lightweight automotive designs. This includes pretreatments for metal surfaces to combine steel and aluminum, as well as liquid soundproofing and 3D reinforcement technologies. These solutions contribute to weight reduction in the chassis and increase fuel efficiency. The solutions sold in 2022 saved around 4.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions for our customers.

There are three major challenges for battery manufacturers: cost-efficient processes and technologies allowing high-speed assembly of cells; ensuring reliable thermal management for operational safety and meeting flammability standards; and allowing serviceability of battery packs. With our solutions and know-how, we are an industry leading full-solutions partner, supporting our customers from design to integration.

Confronted with global water scarcity, manufacturers of liquid filtration systems serving water treatment, food and beverage industries consistently need to optimize the reliability and efficiency of their products. Cleaning and maintenance costs incurred by filter users need to be kept as low as possible for their processes to remain competitive. We offer tailor-made solutions along the entire process filtration value chain.

Leveraging our broad innovation portfolio and in keeping with our sustainability priorities, we developed the industry’s first bio-based polyurethane reactive ‏(PUR) hot melt designed for consumer electronics assembly. This is our inaugural consumer electronics-specific, bio-based PUR hot melt adhesive; approximately two-thirds of its content is sourced from renewable, plant-based feedstocks.

Successfully creating sustainable and recyclable packaging starts during the design phase: The right choice of adhesive significantly influences what can be done with the package at the end of its primary use. With our adhesives and coatings designed for recycling, we enable packaging to go beyond current functionalities – to create flexible packaging that has recyclability “built in”.

We offer sustainable, water-based adhesive solutions for a wide range of applications. Our high-impact water-based bonding technology for sports shoes allows improved manufacturing efficiency and increased production capacity at our customers while also enabling a CO2 footprint reduction of up to 30% in the adhesive bonding process.

As first adhesive manufacturer worldwide, we introduced plastic-free blister packaging for our broad portfolio of consumer adhesives globally, starting with the Pritt glue sticks. The plastic-free blister packs are made from minimum 85 percent recycled paper and are fully recyclable. And we aim to further enhance recyclability. 

About 40 percent of CO2 emissions worldwide are caused by buildings. We contribute to green construction through heat- and fire-resistant adhesives for high-rise wood construction. With our products we can accelerate the use of sustainable building materials with a significantly lower CO2 emissions during production of the building material, lower transportation emissions and carbon storage in wood materials.

Our adhesive solutions make it easy to sustainably replace emission intensive materials. Even a small quantity of our threadlocker product matches the performance of conventional steel washers for securing screws. This saves a significant amount of steel, which is an emission-intensive material. The products sold in 2022 enabled our customers to save around 0.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.

We are a founding member of the initiative to promote acceleration of the transition from fossil-based to renewable carbon for all organic chemicals and materials. We aim to pioneer new solutions for adhesives, sealants and functional coatings that replace fossil carbon-based raw materials with renewable materials – to reduce the carbon footprint of our products and support our customers in reducing emissions along the value chain.

At our annual conferences we bring together partners across the global packaging and consumer goods industry to discuss the industry’s response to current sustainability needs. Sustainability Days 2022, congregated 1,500 attendees from 650 companies and 81 countries to address topics such as circular economy, reducing environmental footprint of products and packaging, and emerging regulatory challenges.

We are partnering with the FREEDM Systems Engineering Research Center at the North Carolina State University to study the impact of materials technology on power electronics applications. We have joined the FREEDM Systems Center to leverage services from North Carolina's PREES lab facilities. 

To pioneer in transparency we joined Catena-X, a pan-European network that aims to standardize the methodology for calculating footprints and the associated data exchange for all participants in the automotive value chain. With the foundation of the joint venture Cofinity-X, partners of the automotive industry foster the adoption of the network and accelerate the operation and adoption of Catena-X use-cases.

Henkel entered a strategic partnership with RWTH Aachen University’s Production Engineering of E-Mobility Components ‏(PEM Motion GmbH) to collaborate on research projects in the field of e-mobility. By building a strong partnership between industry and academia, we pioneer next generation battery technologies, and explore material requirements for their realization and in the development of safer and more sustainable batteries.