Our Sustainability Approach
Highly valued relationships with our customers and other partners are at the core of our sustainability vision. Advancing such partnerships requires us to provide high quality products and services, which we are well known for.
We incorporate sustainability considerations into our own operations everyday by sourcing less energy-intensive feedstock, minimizing the use of raw materials, recycling our waste, and by powering our operations with green energy sources.
Sustainable practices are part of our daily work processes and are incorporated into our guidelines and strategic planning.
We create effective methods that incorporate sustainability initiatives into our daily work processes and regularly examine our progress for reporting and improvement opportunities. Our employees and industry partners are fully engaged in creating innovative approaches to positively impact the economic, social and environmental aspects of our products, services and manufacturing practices.
Raw materials have the highest impact on our corporate carbon footprint, contributing more than 80%.
As major share of our carbon emissions come from raw materials, most activity has been targeted towards replacing raw materials with highest CO2 impact.
Prevention and reduction of material usage is the highest level in the waste hierarchy, and downgauging has always been one of the core issues in our development of multilayer films. Recyclable PA-free and PE-based films are increasing in popularity, also in the development of our medical films. Identifying bio-based materials that could be utilised in highly regulated medical packaging applications is high on our research and development agenda. Medical grade papers have always been used as a breathable solution for EO and steam sterilization. We also use water-based inks when possible. We aim to increase our recycling rates and usage of chemical recycling.
We have also started to optimize our internal and external logistics processes. CO2 efficiency is in our key selection criteria when choosing our transport and logistics partners and planning our production process. In addition, we have started an energy preservation program and aim to achieve 100% renewable energy. In Finland, this is already a reality, as all our Finnish plants are now exclusively using carbon neutral energy. Other Wiicare plants will follow.
In some of our units, we already have our forklifts run on electricity, we use cores and plugs made of our own plastic waste, we have shifted to using LED lights, and implemented solar panels for own energy production. We also engage our employees in activities that everyone can do (such as switching off lights and computers) to support our common goal. These are all examples of the actions that we are constantly taking to achieve our strategic goal.
While we are excited about where these sustainability actions are leading us, patient safety remains always our highest priority.
We make no compromises in quality to avoid pack leakage, contaminated medical devices causing patient infections, or re-processing packing and sterilization processes.
