Envac contributes
In 2015, the United Nations established the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to make the world more sustainable before 2030. The SDG:s cover a wide scope of issues from sanitation and preventing infectious diseases; to clean water and air; to resilient urban environments and reduced fossil fuel consumption. Our system tackles these challenges and helps cities, organizations, and businesses do their part to reach the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
Our response
One of the Sustainable Development Goals is to improve health and safety for the world’s citizens. Our system promotes user safety and health as it prevents unsanitary conditions, odours and vermin and our touch-free technology reduces transmission of diseases.
As waste collection traffic is reduced in densely populated areas, deaths and injuries from traffic accidents are minimised. Our solutions for hospitals promote safer handling of contaminated laundry, as well as medical waste within the hospital.
Traditional waste collection includes regular cleaning of waste containers, increasing water consumption as well as the apparent risk of contaminating groundwater resources. Water consumption for cleaning can be as high as 200 liters per inhabitant each year. Our innovative system minimises this pressure on water supplies and helps reach the UN goal of improved water management globally.
Envac’s system and services help reach the UN goals of responsible consumption and production by bringing waste collection into the circular economy. Envac’s system can handle several fractions of waste and with our sorting system, recycling is made easy and cost-efficient, re-using resources in a never-ending loop. Food waste can be used to produce bioenergy and biofertilizers.
Envac is the perfect partner to reach the UN’s goals of resilient and sustainable infrastructure. Our system is resilient and continues to operate even in extreme conditions. Our installation on Roosevelt Island, NYC has been in operation since 1975 and operated through both the heavy snowstorm of 2010 and hurricane Sandy in 2012.
It is also possible to retrofit our system in existing delicate urban areas. This has been done for example in the historical environment in Bergen, Norway and in Northern Spain, with great success.
With the evergrowing urbanisation, the pressure to create sustainable, smart cities increase. Envac helps to create more sustainable urban environments where roads give way to walkways, bike lanes, and green areas. Combined with better air quality as a result of less waste collection traffic, we help cities achieve the UN’s Goal 11 and improve urban quality-of-life.
Our automated system eliminates many of the health and safety risks associated with traditional, manual waste collection, promoting the safe and secure working environment of UN’s Goal 8.
Our pneumatic waste collection has proven positive impacts on climate change, covered in goal 13, as the pneumatic collection reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90%. This is one of the reasons the European Commission sees pneumatic waste collection as best practice for urban areas and why many of the world’s cities, such as Singapore, Stockholm and Seoul have made it their waste collection of choice.
Sustainability report 2021
Envac has committed to making its global operation carbon neutral by 2030 following the publication of its annual sustainability report. Launched in June 2022, the report illustrates our environmental, economic and social achievements throughout 2021.
Read the full report