Sustainability & Commitment

Sustainability & Commitment

Dipharma is committed to “making a positive difference”.
For us, this means taking as much care of our environment and community as we take of the products ultimately used for treating patients. As such, this commitment encompasses the safety of consumers, our workers, our neighbours, and future generations. To achieve this, we have put continuous improvement programs in place for

  • Quality: to ensure the health and safety of consumers.
  • Health, Safety and Environment: to ensure the health and safety of our workers, neighbours and future generations.

In 2024, in recognition of our continued commitment to improving sustainability, the international rating agency EcoVadis has awarded us with the Bronze Medal.

Dipharma’s Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) policy aims to achieve the following objectives:

  • To build a healthy and safe working environment, by promoting positive actions and attitudes, to ensure that we achieve and then maintain zero work-related injuries and illnesses;
  • To reduce our consumption of natural resources and energy and to minimise our environmental footprint, by improving the efficiency of our production processes.
  • To achieve these objectives, Dipharma continuously strives to:
  1. Strictly comply with all applicable laws and all corporate HSE procedures.
  2. Actively manage HSE with dedicated personnel, equipment and systems.
  3. Understand that we are all responsible and accountable for HSE, and as such receive appropriate information, training, protection devices, and supervision.
  4. Identify safe behaviour practices, ensure that these are monitored and appraised by management and co-workers to shape a positive, rather than punitive, safety culture.
  5. Manufacture our products and manage our processes and technologies in a safe manner after assessing them for their risks and environmental impact.
  6. Ensure that we have emergency procedures and resources in place to control and limit the impact of any incidents.
  7. Consolidate our HSE know-how to by bringing intelligent and cost-effective solutions that support our continuous improvement process.
  8. Measure our HSE performance and periodically audit our operations to ensure that our programs are delivering the expected results and contributing to our continuous improvement.

The health and safety risks are evaluated and reviewed to offer the best possible prevention and protection to our workers. Such evaluations take into account for example, the choice of work equipment, chemical substances or preparations used, the fitting-out of workplaces, etc.

Our prevention program seeks to avoid risks wherever possible, otherwise to:

  • evaluate the risks which cannot be avoided
  • combat the risks at source
  • replace the dangerous with non or less dangerous
  • create a healthy work environment and thus reduce the need for specific protection devices
  • provide appropriate instructions

We have implemented a health surveillance plan, which is designed for each worker on the basis of the specific risk assessment for his/her function. Each worker receives health surveillance by the company doctors at regular intervals and on demand.

Furthermore, we have also started some health risk prevention campaigns, such as for example:

  • Free voluntary vaccination against flu
  • Anti-smoking campaign

Safety unconditionally ranks number 1 in our values. Our attention to safety dates back to the origins of our business as a civil explosive manufacturer and is an integral part of our culture. It has been reinforced as we have added further hazardous processes to our technology portfolio.

In recent years, Dipharma has consistently performed better than the Italian chemical industry’s average on both frequency and severity indexes. The frequency index measures the number of recordable injuries in proportion to the hours worked, whereas the severity index measures the severity of those injuries (days of absence and invalidity scores) in proportion to the hours worked.

In recent years, we have improved, yet we are not satisfied with our performance and we believe that we are capable of doing much better.

Dipharma has made substantial investments to preserve the environment more effectively.

Air emissions
In all our sites, off-gases are conveyed to scrubbers for neutralization. A further treatment using activated carbons, cryogenic condensation, regenerative thermal oxidation, or incineration is also performed as deemed appropriate.

Wastewater and Liquid waste
Our Italian operations apply a chemical-physical and biological treatment to wastewater. Some of the waste containing solvents is incinerated on-site and the heat generated is used to cover part of our steam requirements, thus reducing our consumption of energy.

Solid wastes
Solid wastes are transferred to authorised waste disposal companies. Where applicable, solid wastes are recycled.

Energy efficiency and renewable energy
Dipharma has made several investments aimed at reducing its energy consumption such as:

  • new high-performance cogeneration and trigeneration plants
  • thermal insulation of the buildings
  • substitution of low-efficiency electric equipment
  • hybrid as well as fully electric company cars
  • solar-powered charging station for electric company cars and employees’ vehicles
  • solar thermal panels (water heaters)