Innovation

Innovation is a core element of our sustainability strategy and is central to how we’re building for what’s next.

It plays a critical role in responding to long-term challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity and biodiversity loss. In the short to medium term, it enables us to anticipate changing customer demand and strengthens our core business.

We see innovation as essential in enabling the creation of smarter and better-performing buildings that reduce our impact on the environment and improve people’s quality of life. We pursue breakthrough technologies for our manufacturing processes, implement circular initiatives, and innovative designs for our products and services.

Manufacturing processes

Circular initiatives

Product & service innovations

Manufacturing processes

Innovation in manufacturing focuses on reducing energy and resource intensity while maintaining quality, performance and safety. This includes upgrading existing factories, trialling new technologies and improving process efficiency across energy-intensive operations.

Our work includes electrification, alternative fuels such as hydrogen, heat recovery, and improvements to energy and water management at site level. These innovations are tested in live environments and developed with scalability in mind.

The embodied carbon of our products is heavily influenced by our manufacturing processes and our raw materials, therefore technology and material innovations will be game-changing.

Our manufacturing processes will assist wienerberger’s transition to a net-zero emission, nature-positive company.

We have established enduring partnerships with suppliers and universities to develop, test and deploy new technologies and processes.
We have secured funding to support the adoption of novel decarbonisation technologies including kiln electrification and hydrogen firing.
We will scale technologies and solutions that reduce energy and resource intensity.

Circular initiatives

Going beyond recycling to create products, services and business operations that neither deplete the planet’s resources nor create waste.

Designing products and services with a whole lifecycle approach, facilitating building deconstruction and material reuse, will reduce our impact on the environment.

We will have integrated circular economy principles into our business model by designing out waste across the whole product lifecycle.

We have achieved high levels of waste diversion from landfill and are now targeting diversion from incineration.
We have modelled the whole lifecycle of our products to understand their environmental impacts and have published Environmental Product Declarations to share this information with our customers.
We will seek partnerships with organisations who challenge the status quo of a linear economy.
To support the development of a circular economy for our current product range, we will publish customer deconstruction and reuse guidance for each product category.

Circular initiatives and waste prevention

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Environmental product declarations

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Product and service innovations

Our product and service innovations help our customers to minimise whole lifecycle emissions from buildings and help inhabitants adapt to the impacts of climate change.

This includes developing products that support lower-carbon construction, efficient water management and promote biodiversity, alongside providing customers with tools and data that enable informed decision-making in specification.

Our products already facilitate energy and water efficiency in buildings. In future the construction sector will require more products and services that improve people’s quality of life. By carefully curating our products and services, we can amplify positive impacts upstream and downstream of our operations, not just in individual products, but across entire systems.

Our products and services will improve people’s quality of life, promoting biodiversity and the efficient use of energy and water in the built environment.

We have updated internal product development scorecards to favour product concepts that improve outcomes for biodiversity and promote a circular economy.
We have responded to our customers’ needs with new products and services, such as RoofSpec+ and Renatus for retrofit projects.
We will conduct ecological footprint assessments for each product category.