The costs of environmental protection for the European sites have been a good 4.5 million euros each year. In the year under review a greater focus on energy efficiency has led to a moderate increase in costs.

Expenditure on environmental protection in millions of Euros

Since the investments concerned relate to purely environmental facilities such as filters, waste water treatment systems and other end-of-pipe technologies, these expenditures were kept relatively low in the past few years. Our objective here increasingly is to avoid creating an environmental burden at the outset so that there is no need to provide relevant technologies further down the line. In the year under review (2004/05) we had to invest however in a system for thermal post-combustion treatment.