As evidenced around the world, increasing population and economic growth are driving resource demand and consumption. Already today we are seeing Earth’s natural resources becoming more scarce and climate change will also have significant impacts across many of the same sectors.
Launched in 2011, and led by Tuula Paajanen, Director of Corporate Responsibility, our Corporate Responsibility program focuses on three priority areas:
- Sustainable products and solutions
- Responsible operations and supply chain
- People and integrity
These three priorities cover our six most material topics which relate to products addressing customers’ sustainability requirements, safe use of our products throughout their lifecycle, environmental impacts and safety of our operations, responsible business practices in our supply chain, and our people and business integrity.
Our management approach aims to create long-term economic, social and environmental value, while addressing in a tangible way the global megatrends and challenges facing our business.
For our stakeholders, our Corporate responsibility work is also visible in our Leadership A recognition from CDP for our environmental stewardship as well as a Gold rating from EcoVadis for our sustainability practices as a supplier to our customers. Our ratings are above average for the chemical industry.
Stakeholder expectations in the core of our sustainability work
Kemira enables its customers sustainability through anticipation of regulatory changes, innovative products for resource efficiency, substitutes to harmful substances and transparency in its supply chain.
“It is important that we have a clear understanding of our stakeholder concerns and expectations of Kemira’s impacts on society and environment. It is also critical to stay informed on external sustainability norms and requirements that are in place now or are emerging for the chemical industry, our business segments and the regions in which we operate,” says Tuula Paajanen.
Since our corporate responsibility program was introduced, we have truly built a solid foundation as to how these activities are integrated into our everyday work practices and we’ve put a lot of emphasis on continuously developing management practices. For example, to effectively steer and follow-up our safety and environmental performance we have put a lot of effort to develop our data management system to collect and analyze information from all of our manufacturing sites about incidents, water and energy consumption, emissions and effluents.
We have also worked diligently to incorporate supplier risk and compliance management as part of sustainable sourcing. Corporate responsibility is also closely aligned to our ethics and compliance program which makes a strong foundation of integrity and responsible business practices.
We are seeing a growing external demand to ensure transparency and actions around climate-related risks and opportunities. Our financial stakeholders, especially socially responsible investors (SRI) want to understand how climate risks are integrated into our existing risk and governance processes, and how the risks and opportunities are likely to impact our future financial position and the resilience of our strategy and customer demand. Our customers are looking more and more for products that improve their resource efficiency, and how we can supply these products with lower carbon footprint. In working with our investors, they clearly want to understand the revenue implications from these climate related opportunities. While this is a challenge for chemical companies, this also presents a great opportunity for us to truly partner with our customers to create solutions that improve product quality, resource efficiency and sustainability.
In the ever-changing sustainability landscape, we need to be as open and transparent as possible and continue to behave with high integrity towards our all of stakeholders.
Read more about our CR program and our areas of focus
