Our Commitment to the Environment

We are committed to constantly improving our environmental systems and performance.

Climate Change 

• Reduce Product Energy Consumption
• Working to SEMI, ITRS & S23 Guidelines*
• Reduce Emissions
• Reduce Customers’ Emissions

Resource Conservation 

• Reduce/Reuse/Recycle
• Reduce Hazardous Content of our Products
• Remanufacturing & Service

 Download our Environment, Health & Safety Policy

Download our policy on REACH and RoHS compliance

*SEMI = Semiconductor Equipment & Materials International.
*ITRS = International Technology Road-map for Semiconductors
*S23 = Guide for conservation of energy, utilities and materials used by semiconductor manufacturing equipment

To support these aims, we have published a set of Green Goals covering our plans to reduce the impact of our operations of our products.

We will ….

• Reduce Our Customers’ Carbon Footprints through the use of our products - by providing equipment to abate our customers’ emissions and introducing high efficiency vacuum and abatement products.

• Reduce the Carbon Intensity of our Operations.

• Reduce Waste - from our facilities, eliminating all waste to landfill - and by enabling the reuse of our products through service and remanufacture.

• Reduce Water Usage at our facilities.

• Maintain ISO14001 Compliance at all major facilities, and introduce a global environmental management system for the business.

We have strong environmental management systems in place to ensure we achieve our goals. 

• All major sites are certified via a common global management system to ISO14001, the international standard for environmental management systems
• Quarterly reporting and analysis of key carbon, water and waste data by all sites
• International Standard for Environmental Management Systems
• Annual Survey at all Sites covering Key Environmental Impacts & Control
  
  

 Download our ISO/OHSAS Certificates

Our Memberships
We participate in several environmental memberships globally and contribute to case studies, such as the Special Report on GHG Management and Reporting, with Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) the professional membership body for promoting best practice standards in environmental management, auditing and assessment for all industry sectors.

We are a member of:

• The Electronic Industries Citizenship Coalition (RBA) -an electronics industry scheme to improve the social, economic and environmental conditions of the industry and its supply chain.                                            
• SEMI Global Care™ - Semiconductor industry program encouraging improvement and excellence in environment, safety and product stewardship.       
• The International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI) –a world-wide collaborative program dedicated to cooperatively finding and implementing the most cost-effective, environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes and procedures.                                                                                   
• the European association of vacuum pump and compressor manufacturers Pneurop, which represents its members in European and international forums working to harmonise technical rules, standards and legislation

Contributing to case studies, such as the Special Report on GHG Management and Reporting, with Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA), the professional membership body for promoting best practice standards in environmental management, auditing and assessment for all industry sectors.

Actions on Resource Conservation 
We have an excellent track record in the environment, helping bring benefits to some of the world’s biggest businesses by reducing customers’ power and water consumption, treating hazardous waste and remanufacturing used pumps.

Our remanufacturing story is a particularly significant environmental success story.Imagine a car industry able to offer complete recycling, but that’s what happened in the world of vacuum pumps. In the last thirty years we are now the global leader of recycling pumps and remanufacturing is now a significant part of Edwards service business.

Remanufacturing & Service
After use many Edwards products are contaminated with hazardous process by-products, and - if disposed of - would need to be treated as hazardous waste.

A global network of service and remanufacturing facilities which safely decontaminate and remanufacture over 35,000 used vacuum pumps a year. Most vacuum pumps run 24/7 and are re-used 4-10 times over a 10-20 year lifetime. That’s equivalent to a car travelling around 2 million miles!

Remanufacture typically involves the reuse of over 90% by weight of a pump’s components – with a corresponding saving in raw materials and their embodied carbon dioxide. In Europe we offer a free recycling service for gauges and controllers.

Energy Efficiency Upgrades
Our latest generation energy efficient products not only offer energy savings, reduced utilities consumption and reduced carbon emissions, but also potentially offer future-proofing against carbon taxes and may qualify for “Green Grants”.

We enable customers running older generation pumping and abatement products to benefit from these features with our upgrade programs, which include the responsible recycling of upgraded products returned to us through our remanufacturing operations.

Reducing Our Emissions
Organic solvents containing Volatile Organic Compounds are a major source of pollution in the lower atmosphere and especially in built-up areas where respiratory problems can be caused.

Water based cleaning has eliminated the use of solvents in our production and remanufacturing processes.In addition, the use of closed-loop recirculating water systems in our remanufacturing facilities reduces their water consumption by more than 90%.

Reduced Hazardous Material Content
There is a growing amount of legislation around the world (for example EU RoHS Directive*) to eliminate trace levels of heavy metals from electronic products, as these have the potential to leach out of landfill sites

Although vacuum equipment is outside the scope of the RoHS Directive, we are implementing a voluntary policy to eliminate all ‘RoHS 6’ chemicals from our new product ranges. Information on RoHS compliance of Edwards products can be found on the product section of our website.

* EU Directive 2011/65/EU on the Restriction of certain Hazardous Substances controls the levels of lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenyl ethers in certain categories of electrical equipment. 

View our RoHS Policy

Reducing Waste
It is our policy that all major facilities are certified to ISO14001.

As part of our management systems, our environmental policy incorporates a number of initiatives to minimize unnecessary waste. For a number of years we have been implementing a successful recycling policy as part of our active company policy on reducing landfill waste.

Solid State Lighting
Solid-state lighting sources, such as light emitting diodes (LEDs), offer energy savings and environmental benefits compared to traditional incandescent or fluorescent lamps. In some cases they can offer a 80% energy saving over conventional lighting systems. LEDs are semiconductor devices manufactured under vacuum using gases that need careful handling – Edwards vacuum and abatement systems enable the process and protect the environment.

Sollar Cells
A photovoltaic solar cell (PV cell) is also a semiconductor device which, in the presence of light, generates electricity. Solar cells provide clean renewable energy, producing zero air pollution, hazardous waste or noise. As economies of scale take effect, the size of the process chambers has increased – again Edwards vacuum and abatement equipment is at the forefront of enabling the development of this environmentally beneficial technology ensuring it is achieved with minimum environmental impact from production.

Glass Coating
Vacuum coated glass is primarily used to control the solar generated thermal energy load on buildings. Multiple layers comprising exotic metal oxides create infrared reflecting properties. Reducing the heat load on buildings reduces the need for electrical power to run air conditioning in hot countries. Conversely in cold countries these same reflective properties are used to retain heat and reduce fuel used for heating. By upgrading the vacuum pumping technology (from diffusion pumps to STP turbo molecular pumps) we have reduced the energy consumption of this process by up to 95%, with a CO2 reduction of 22.6 tonnes per year.

Biofuel Production
The term biofuel applies to any solid, liquid or gaseous fuel produced from organic (once-living) matter. The word biofuel covers a wide range of products, some of which are commercially available today and some of which are still in research and development. Processing this material under vacuum, using Edwards chemical dry pumps, avoids contamination of oil and water that is an integral part of other vacuum technologies.

Steel Degassing
Vacuum degassing (VD) and vacuum oxygen decarburisation (VOD) are used in the production of specialty steel alloys to reduce the levels of hydrogen, carbon and other impurities during the secondary steel making process.

Edwards dry mechanical vacuum pumps offer considerable energy savings compared to the traditional multi-stage steam ejector systems, backed with liquid ring pumps.

Did you know? That over 50% of the world's solar panels are made using Edwards products!

There are two main ways in which we make a positive impact to the environment; firstly making our products more efficient and effective at what they do, and secondly how we manage our impact on the environment within our business.

We care about sustainability and we are working to ensure the things we do, and the way we do them, become more sustainable. We have made several major step changes in product design driven by environmental considerations. Efficient use of resources is crucial in our product design and development, lowering cost of ownership for customers with particular emphasis on reducing power and water consumption.

Reduced Carbon Emissions of Latest Generation Products
Primary Pumps
Reducing our customers’ energy use in the semiconductor industry process pumps are one of the largest energy users on a process tool which in turn can account for over a third of a fab’s energy use (SEMATECH Energy research). The global installed base of semiconductor vacuum pumps consumes the equivalent energy of Sheffield in the UK or Plano in Texas, USA.

We design in energy saving and reduced utility costs without compromising reliability. Using a platform design process each successive generation of our primary pumps consumes less energy. For example the latest generation dry pumps use around 30% less energy than previously. Now, with the introduction of Active Utility Control (AUC) we reduce consumption of energy and utilities even further when pumps are idle using signals from the tool. 

We make sure that the benefits of our latest generation platform technology are used throughout our pump range. These benefits are made available to customers running older generation pumps through Edwards’ energy efficiency upgrade programs.

We also advise customers how to minimize energy used by our equipment.

Secondary Pumps
Reducing global energy consumption is key in the fight against global warming. In addition to minimising the energy our production facilities and offices consume, our latest generations of turbo molecular pump ranges enable our customers to meet their energy reduction targets. Edwards offers upgrade programmes enabling customers to switch to energy efficient turbo molecular pump technology.

For example, benefits of switching from oil diffusion pumps to STP turbo molecular pumps:

• Lower utility cost (Power and Water)
• No annual maintenance or oil changes
• Increased pumping performance
• Very low ambient noise and low vibration
• Reduced space requirements

Abatement
Semiconductor manufacturing processes use gases, such as per fluorocarbons and sulphurhexafluoride, which are of high environmental concern due to their persistence and high Global Warming Potential (GWP). These substances may have GWP’s 1000’s of times that of carbon dioxide.

For example: If CO2 has a global warming potential (GWP) of 1 over 100 years, over the same time period - SF6 has a GWP of 23,900, NF3 has a GWP of 10,970 and CF4 has a GWP of 6,500

We've been helping our customers achieve high levels of destruction removal efficiency of these substances since the mid 1990s using our combustion abatement technology. More recently with plasma technology, our customers have been able to achieve CO2 reductions of >90% across entire fabs - in line with The World Semiconductor Council’s targets.For production of flat panels and emerging environmental devices such as solar panels and LED lighting, we have developed the Spectra Z and Spectra G Abatement Systems to cope with higher gas flows. In fact we estimate that Edwards abatement products prevent CO2 output equivalent to 1% of the UK’s annual CO2 output.

The Atlas range of abatement products use up to 50% less fuel than previous ranges. Edwards also offers Atlas technology as an energy efficiency upgrade to previous ranges of abatement products by combining pumps and abatement systems we have saved energy as well by applying idle mode technology.

eZenith
We've combined abatement and pumping systems as well as using other techniques similar to those on pumps, to reduce the environmental impact of abatement products. This has resulted in energy reductions of up to 50% on some abatement products such as the Zenith Atlas system. 

eZenith is the latest iteration of the Zenith concept which incorporates state of the art iGX and iXH pumps. The iXH is the most energy efficient pump for its size ever produced – and the latest Atlas abatement equipment, where intensive lab work has enabled the size of the combustor to be reduced by about half without any sacrifice in performance.As a result fuel consumption is reduced by a similar amount, giving significant environmental and cost ofownership benefits. In addition, eZenith provides benefits of Space saving and small footprint centralised controls and speed of install.

A key attraction of the eZenith is that it is already green mode enabled. Process tools tend to be idle about 25% of the time, and when this happens the eZenith switches to green mode which reduces the fuel consumption by 90%. Energy is major item of expenditure in a fab – in Korea it is estimated that Samsung’s semiconductor activities alone use 1% of all the country’s power – so reduced running costs and the ability to switch to green mode represent a significant saving for the customer.

Did you know? That over 8 million tonnes of CO2e was abated in our customer's facilities in the year 2013.