Hilti is a provider of tools, services,
and software to the construction industry.
And we've been doing that for over 80 years
to over 120 countries around the world.
From the beginning, acting responsibly has been a key part
of how we work as a company.
But we also understand that in the last few years,
the expectation of society and of our employees
and of our stakeholders has increased
with everything related to sustainability.
We really wanted to take sustainability to the next level.
And for us, a very important part of sustainability
is the circular economy.
The construction industry is a really unique industry
because on the one hand it solves a core human need
for building the buildings where we all live and work.
On the other hand, we know that it's a huge driver
of some of the environmental problems that we understand.
Over 50% of the raw materials that we use in the world
go into construction, but still today,
less than 10% of our resources are used in a circular way.
Hilti would like to be
our customers' partner for sustainability
and we want to lead the industry in circularity.
And that means two things for us:
offering circular solutions for our customers,
but also role modeling circularity in our own operations.
It's really about valuing these raw materials
which we sometimes don't properly value.
So it's about keeping those materials in use,
but also mitigating supply chain risks
and being less dependent on volatile international markets.
Unlike CO2, there is no global standard
on how to measure circularity.
Together with BCG, we created our Hilti circularity score
about understanding our circular performance
and it's divided into two overall topics.
The quantitative side and the qualitative side.
The very first thing that CIRCelligence allowed us to do
was to have a really comprehensive database
of the raw materials that we purchase as a company.
Like most companies, we were able to say how much money
that we spent buying, for example, steel,
but couldn't have told you easily
how many tons of steel that meant
or how much recycled content was part of that.
So a very big focus of that initial work
was understanding what is actually the material footprint
of how many materials we're using,
how does that break down,
and what is the recycled content across each material group?
On top of that,
we were then able to build out the methodology
of measuring circularity across the value chain.
So not just on the raw material and the input footprint,
but across these five blocks in the product life cycle.
And that really holistic picture allowed us to take a look
and ultimately start initiatives that we're working on now.
And here we've really begun our journey on remanufacturing.
We have over 70 repair centers all over the world.
Here, we've started extracting components
from our collected tools and reusing those in repairs.
So electronics, motors, rotors.
These are all things that we're able able to extract,
requalify, and reuse instead of shipping,
transporting new spare parts.
Anything that we can't reuse
either internally or externally,
we take care of the recycling together
with qualified external partners.
Last year, we recycled
over 3,400 tons of electronic waste responsibly.
And the key thing about that
is that we are then able to provide transparency and details
on that recycling and that reuse back to our customers.
Hilti partnered with BCG, BCGX,
and also SAP on laying the groundwork
for how to automate the circularity score.
And that is to make it more usable
to have a web-based interface that allows us
to really take that digitalization to the next level.
Ultimately, we really wanted to provide a service
for the industry, not only the construction industry,
but the broader landscape of any company
that's embarking on circularity.
And we hope that by being extremely transparent
in publishing the scores,
we're also able to spark the conversation
on what are the most difficult things to improve
and what are the things that really matter the most?