Water is one of the world's most sensitive natural resources and we work to minimize water consumption in all relevant processes. At the Regensburg plant we have kept water consumption at a constant level despite the expansion of our production capacity. This was achieved partly through savings and the reuse of water, e.g. for exhaust air treatment in scrubbers. But the expansion of production through higher capacity utilization, producing more wafers while using the same amount of water and changes to manufacturing processes also played an important role.

See how we care for water protection:

• We use pre-treated wastewater repeatedly in our production processes, for example in the purification of exhaust gases.
• Permeate - the low-quality water from the highest-purity water production - used to be discharged. Today it is used as a coolant, to purify exhaust gases, and last but not least to produce limewash for wastewater purification.
• We have reduced our water consumption to zero by gradually replacing mechanical saws with laser dicer.

Thanks to these measures we have been able to cut our water consumption in all our production processes by about 15% in the recent years. As satisfying as this may be, it encourages us to improve our manufacturing processes even further: for example by regulating the cleaning cycles based on throughput instead of time.