Sustainable today and 40 years ago / Shera addresses energy crisis

The topic of sustainability has a long tradition at SHERA. With two thousand borrowed marks in his pocket, a lot of courage and Swabian frugality, Günther Grill founded Shera Werkstoff-Technologie in Lemförde more than forty years ago. The limited financial resources forced the then 55-year-old to act sustainably - perhaps involuntarily. Re-use, i.e. the reuse of resources, was a piece of the puzzle for Shera in 1983 when the company was built up. And it still is today.

Reuse packaging material

To ship his dental products to the dental laboratories, the company founder used used boxes and packaging material. He got these from local supermarkets. This saved him the cost of packaging material. Instead, Grünther Grill invested these funds in researching dental materials and in employees. The company grew. Two thousand marks of start-up capital and a Swabian one-man show have now turned into an annual turnover of around 19 million euros and 90 employees. In the second generation, his son Jens Grill is running Shera as owner and managing director. And with it the idea of sustainability.

Power consumption reduced

Sustainable business is one of Shera's current corporate goals. There is a working group for this in which employees from various departments, from trainees to managers, develop ideas and initiate measures that help conserve resources. And this has borne fruit: intelligent lighting planning for the new hall construction helps save energy. The installation of motion detectors and more and more LED technology throughout the company are contributing to more sustainable business. Electricity consumption fell from around 251,000 kilowatt hours to 238,000 kilowatt hours.

Shera has been operating a photovoltaic system with an output of around 100 kilowatt peak since 2011. This means that the company feeds an average of 67,000 kilowatt hours per year into the grid and can thus offset some of the high electricity costs. "We constantly remind our employees to really turn off computers, printers and screens at the end of the day or to ensure that they ventilate the rooms," explains Shera boss Jens Grill.

The managing director of the medium-sized company is very surprised at the development of gas consumption. While it was still around 431 thousand kilowatt hours in 2021, it fell to 342 thousand kilowatt hours in 2022. That is a saving of around 20 percent. "We throttled the heating system and turned it down a bit, autumn and winter 2022 were mild, nobody froze here - but we did not expect these savings," says Jens Grill happily. It is worth doing business sustainably.

100 percent green electricity and green gas since 2018

In 2018, the company decided to switch completely to electricity and gas from renewable energies and to accept the associated higher procurement costs. According to the energy supplier's calculations, Shera is thus reducing CO2 Imprint by around 200 tons per year. Shera accepts the higher prices for electricity and gas in order to make amends, explains Jens Grill. "We use a lot of energy and raw materials in our production processes. Chemistry is involved here: plastics, silicones and chemical liquids that we need to manufacture products for dental technology and medicine. The dental industry is not clean and cannot be. But as a small medium-sized company, we can be as careful as possible to use all available resources carefully and make amends where we cannot avoid pollution. Everything else is greenwashing and eyewash."

His father Günther Grill would have been pleased: Even today, Shera reuses old packaging material that was in the packages from suppliers or that employees bring from home. Only then does recycled film go into the approximately 220,000 packages that are sent from Lemförde every year in a CO2-neutral manner to dental laboratories all over the world.