A Strong Drive for Sustainability with ASML
Plansee and ASML have a longstanding business relationship. In the context of this collaboration, sustainability has become increasingly important over the past two years.
ASML is the world market leader in lithography systems for manufacturing microchips. Throughout its long customer relationship with ASML, Plansee has familiarized itself with how the company operates and has a detailed understanding of the challenges involved. The focus of this collaboration is on extending the service life of components by means of refurbishment or repair. Plansee is now also involved in the development phase of components, which are designed in such a way that they are easier to refurbish at the end of their service life. Over the past few years, Plansee has invested heavily in the processes required in order to offer ASML this service.
"We are already able to refurbish two products for ASML. In fact, we are already supplying more refurbished products than new products. The rate of supply is significantly more than 50%," says Michael Weirather, Manager of the Business Segment Electronic Solutions. "ASML returns the products to us, then we dismantle the components into their individual parts, clean and repair them and, if necessary, replace any defective parts." Refurbishing the products in this way not only saves CO2 but also raw materials. In concrete terms, we have been able to save 38 tons of CO2 and more than 3,200 kg of raw material in the last year. Plansee is therefore focusing on the further expansion of processes and expertise to enable them to refurbish considerably more products in future.
"If components really have come to the end of their service life and can neither be reused nor refurbished, we can recycle these for ASML. We therefore maintain an overview of the complete life cycle management in order to make this even more sustainable," says Andreas Feichtinger, Managing Director of Plansee HPM.
Plansee was awarded the Sustainability Excellence Award 2022 by ASML for these efforts as well as its sustainability strategy. This was largely thanks to the measures that Plansee has implemented with regard to environmental protection, social responsibility, and sustainable company management.