Sustainable supply chain management - three best practice cases

In a world that is increasingly focusing on sustainability and environmental awareness, sustainable supply chain management plays a crucial role, especially in the healthcare sector. Medical technology companies face the challenge of not only developing innovative products that help people, but also of making their supply chains environmentally and socially sustainable. Sustainable supply chain management combines economic efficiency with ecological and social responsibility, making it a key success factor for companies. Below we present three best practice cases of how HARTMANN organises its supply chains in an environmentally friendly and economical way.

PAUL HARTMANN is working together with logistics partners to avoid and reduce CO₂ emissions in the field of container transportation (Scope 3). The concept involves avoiding empty container trips by immediately reloading containers that have been unloaded at the Logistics Center South in Herbrechtingen with goods for export. This reduces empty truck journeys to and from the nearest container depot by approx. 70 km per container. This saves approx. 110 kg of CO₂ per container. In addition, since 1 July 2023, all containers from Asia which a logistics partner organizes for PAUL HARTMANN AG have been handled with biofuel1 in order to further reduce transport-related emissions. This measure will save around 0.95 tons of CO₂ per container.

The sterilization of selected wound care products is partly carried out by external partners. Previously, the products sterilized in this way had to be transported from the sterilizer back to the original production site before being distributed to the central warehouses. A project team has succeeded in significantly reducing the transportation requirements for these products. Quality testing will now take place directly at the external sterilizer. This will result in lower costs and lower CO₂ emissions while maintaining the same quality.