By Ulla Tønnesen, President at DISA
For us, a sustainable casting process cuts out different types of waste by being energy-efficient, minimising scrap and finishing work, and enabling greater casting precision. But it also creates a modern, clean, ergonomic and rewarding working environment. These various aspects reflect sustainability’s broad environmental, commercial and social dimensions – and all of them are about a direction of travel, rather than a finishing line.
With our foundry equipment and solutions , we want to enable any foundry to become more sustainable. Everyone’s journey will be different: moving from older technologies to newer automated vertical, matchplate or horizontal moulding; evolving from repetitive to value-added employee roles; upgrading and retrofitting to reduce energy consumption and waste.
Sustainability is embedded in many of the values that always guide us. Building long-lasting casting machines minimises resource use while their reliability makes it easier to plan ahead, cutting energy, manpower and material consumption.
We continuously develop new features and technologies, delivering valuable cost, energy and materials savings. By making these new features available for retrofit, every foundry can keep improving, always.
Nina Rasmussen, Vice President Product Portfolio Development
Long-term commercial viability is a vital facet of sustainability – and it’s one all foundries naturally support. That’s why we firmly believe in coupling commercial benefits with environmental and social ones. As a foundry equipment manufacturer, we make being good easy by delivering short-term commercial pay-offs alongside longer-term, softer benefits.
Making state-of-the-art technology available to all types of foundries, in all regions, furthers this ambition and aligns our aims with the UN’s Goals for Sustainable Development. For example, the DISAMATIC® C3,brings entry-level vertical moulding to developing countries, while increasing their local manufacturing and design capability. We will continue to make it easier for every foundry to adopt higher performing, more sustainable sand casting processes.
Most important of all, we are committed to continually improving our environmental credentials. ISO 9001 and 14001 accreditations guide our safe and sustainable working practices. We monitor our energy consumption to spot where we can cut it even further. We are working towards recycling 90% of our waste –and. avoiding creating it in the first place: staff can pack up left-over canteen food and take it home for dinner. Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role in the global foundry industry. But we all approach it differently.
At DISA, we try to understand and serve all these varied takes on sustainability.
The ultimate goal? Securing the economic future of foundries in a way that reduces their environmental impact and ensures they happily evolve along with the societies they serve.
Continued success demands original thinking and we apply our LEAN, waste-free principles to make every aspect of DISA’s business sustainable. From reducing energy consumption, recycling and re-using to investing in the latest technology and designing safer, higher performing products, we strive to find fresh ways to work sustainably.
Sustainable materials, minimal impact
Every single purchase has health, environmental, and social impacts. DISA’s policy of sustainable procurement helps to minimise them. Choosing recycled materials and sustainably-produced products lowers emissions and energy consumption – 60% less in the case of recycled paper.
Our machines travel on pallets sourced from sustainably managed forests when they are shipped – rather than flown – to our customers. We prioritise suppliers that comply with the ISO 14001 sustainable standard.
Thinking hard about what we buy. That’s how we keep our footprint on this planet as small as possible.
