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ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

As a health care company, Fresenius is committed to guarding nature as the basis of life and to use its resources responsibly. It is our mission to constantly improve our performance in the areas of environmental protection, occupational health and technical safety, product responsibility and logistics, and to comply with legal requirements.

The international ISO Standard 14001:2004 provides the benchmark for environmental protection in the corporate sector. Among other things, it highlights the need for continuous assessment of a production site’s impact on the environment, for instance with regard to emissions and waste. These international standards are implemented at our various production plants and dialysis clinics.

FRESENIUS MEDICAL CARE

Fresenius Medical Care has established its first Europe-wide environmental management program, defining specific goals to be achieved by the year 2010. These include:

• Definition of environment-relevant performance indicators for all participating production facilities
• Further improvement of energy efficiency and the avoidance of emissions
• Implementation of a feasibility study on the use of alternative energy generation methods at a sample production site
• Improvement of the recycling rate from currently just over 70% to 85%
• Training and raising the awareness or our employees to environmental protection and environmental management issues

• Optimization of the Eco Controlling system for our fastgrowing number of dialysis clinics in Europe.

At our plant in St. Wendel, Germany, we have been systematically implementing measures for energy and resource conservation for many years. In 2007, we continued to improve the environmental impact of our processes. In most cases this led to cost savings, too. We are using new gas burners for generating steam for instance. This has not only led to a substantial reduction in the consumption of heating gas but has also lowered nitrogen oxide emissions by 40%. Fresenius Medical Care has also introduced environment-friendly processes in production at other locations in Europe. At our plant in Italy, a change in the design of the blood bag systems produced there not only led to savings in the packaging but also reduced material consumption in the production process by about 7%.

In North America, too, we are using modern, environmentfriendly technologies to continuously save energy. As in 2006, we further extended the use of heat exchangers. These extract the residual heat from industrial water to heat fresh water for dialysis treatment. By using heat exchangers we can recover about three-fourths of the heat that was previously wasted, substantially lowering energy consumption and costs at our clinics.

At our production plant in Ogden, Utah, we have reduced fresh water consumption overall by 40%, particularly through improved processes in dialyzer production. In addition, 90% of the polycarbonate waste produced in the manufacturing process is being recycled. This makes an important contribution toward waste avoidance since Ogden is our biggest dialyzer plant.

The potential for resource conservation is particularly high at our over 1,602 dialysis clinics in the United States. Nearly 900 clinics employ re-useable containers for collecting medical waste. This enabled us to avoid landfilling more than 600,000 cardboard boxes in 2007. Waste sorting also has an important impact: More than 2,500 tons of cardboard packaging and paper were recycled.