Since its foundation, Elektrotechnik Weber has been helping companies in the electronics industry to find faults, analyze causes and save assemblies instead of scrapping them. This commitment has now been recognized: District President Franz Löffler awarded Ilona and Freddy Weber the first sustainability prize of the Upper Palatinate.
"Elektrotechnik Weber not only helps other companies to use resources more sparingly and reduce theirCO2 consumption, but also to establish a more sustainable production process overall," said Jonas Walter, District President of the Upper Palatinate, in his laudatory speech. "For example, Elektrotechnik Weber has developed a completely new process for repairing the electronics in hermetically encapsulated assemblies and then encapsulating them again to make them watertight and dustproof. With this innovation, the highly specialized company from the Upper Palatinate kept a well-known German manufacturer of electrical machines able to deliver for months."
For Freddy Weber, sustainability begins in his own company: "Over 80% of the heating energy for our KfW 100 building comes from the waste heat from the machines and processes. If that's not enough on cold winter days, an air heat pump provides support. This saves us 3,000 liters of heating oil or 8.5 tons ofCO2 per year." If every EMS company did this, theCO2 emissions of all domestic flights would soon be offset.
Elektrotechnik Weber not only develops new processes. These are then qualified in-house. The company also uses state-of-the-art X-ray equipment for this, the likes of which can only be found at large EMS companies or research institutes. The aim is to keep deviations from established electronics production standards as low as possible, even for repairs and reworking.
For washing assemblies, Elektrotechnik Weber uses low-iron and low-nitrate water from its own source, which is treated on site. "Our customers are regularly amazed that they simply don't find any residue on the assemblies we clean," smiles Freddy Weber. The washing water is cleaned and filtered before it flows back into the water cycle via the sewage system.
The company from Zandt also produces media such as nitrogen itself using an air separator. This saves a lot of transportation and storage losses over the year and further reduces the company'sCO2 footprint. Freddy Weber doesn't know whether there will ever be climate-neutral electronics production, "but that can't stop us from working on it every day!"
This year, for the first time, the district of Cham added a sustainability prize to its innovation prize, which has been awarded since 2007. The sponsor of both prizes is the Sparkasse im Landkreis Cham, which thus underlines the importance of both topics for the region.
