On our website you can now see how much CO2 emissions we and our customers have reduces by using Twinzip products.
By uUsing Twinzip products instead of the usual conventional alkaline degreasing, we reduce our customers CO2 emissions in a first step.
In a second step we compensate the emissions of CO2 from the products Twinzip HD and Alkaline 2, as described below.
The total savings is what we report on our website. The counter was set 1 July 2009.

First with climate-compensated vehicle shampoo

For many years, Lahega has worked purposefully and painstakingly to reduce the number of environmentally-dangerous components in our products. As the first company in the Respect program for climate-integrated product development, we now supply climate compensated car wash shampoo to the automotive industry!

Climate-neutral

As a natural progression of our environmental work, we wanted to produce a new shampoo and make it as climate neutral as possible. After making enquiries at environmental organisations and raw material suppliers, we determined that there was no clear information on how to make such a calculation.
Our raw material suppliers also lacked information on their products that we could use to select raw materials for the product. Instead, we chose to look at the existing products in our range – Twinzip™ HD and Twinzip™ Alkaline 2 – from a climate-neutral perspective.
Twinzip™ HD is a highly concentrated alkaline component while Twinzip™ Alkaline 2 is a highly concentrated base component. When mixed, they form a powerful all-round vehicle shampoo.

Christer Ekstrand, exports

Respect Europe

To aid in the calculations, we sought the help of Respect. They spent the early part of this decade establishing a unique network of world-leading politicians, companies and organisations focusing on the development of market-economy and value-based strategies. Respect has also developed standardised tools to evaluate sustainable climate measures and to make them more effective. Respect conducted a life cycle analysis of all raw materials that made up the products, including the packaging. The following questions were answered for each constituent raw material:

• What is the source material?
• How much energy and what type of energy is used for manufacturing?
• How far are they transported and what forms of transport are used before they reach Lahega?
• How much energy is used by Lahega to manufacture the product?
• How are they transported to the end customer?
• How is the empty packaging handled?

Results

The results showed that for each car washed with our product, 153 g of carbon dioxide was discharged to the atmosphere. That's 32% less than a conventional alkaline car wash shampoo, Autosafe 648, which discharged 228 g per wash.
We plan to compensate for the total amount of carbon dioxide discharged through the sale of the products by investing in projects that prevent the discharge of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. This makes our product climate compensated.
This year – 2009 – we are investing in a project in India where electricity is produced from agricultural waste.

Other environmental efforts

We are often able to reformulate our recipes a few years before tighter legislation goes into effect. Naturally, quality and effect are maintained. We are proud to name the following projects:

• NTA – a complexing agent that is set for remarking. The proposal takes effect in 2010. We will be changing our formulas in autumn 2009.

• Cautions – in accordance with EU Directive 648/2004 (regulation on detergents), we reformulated our detergent products to coantain easily biodegradable surfactants.

• Risk and phase-out substances – the properties that constitute the selection criteria reflect sub goals 3 and 4 in the national environmental quality goal “Non-Toxic Environment”.

• Inhibition of nitrification – a measurement of how quickly components are broken down in the municipal waste treatment plant. Solid work has been performed. All raw materials in all recipes have been tested to ensure that they can be broken down in municipal waste treatment plants.

• REACH – a new treaty within the EU that controls the chemical substances found in the EU. The treaty sets major requirements on manufacturers to register the chemical substances that are handled.
We have been working with this for a couple of years and are well equipped to meet the coming requirements.