Our common aim: A sustainable Södra
The focus of Södra’s Group strategy until 2025 is to create profitable and sustainable growth in an ever-changing world. We will continue to develop our existing products and markets, but also increase our focus on further processing and innovation with a greater customer and market focus. Key to this is resource efficiency and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by digitisation.
We’re also intensifying our commitment to commercialise new products and strengthen our position in the bioeconomy. For a capital-intensive operation like ours, working with internal efficiency and continuous improvements is a linchpin for profitable growth.
The long-term trend in Sweden is that forest growth is increasing and we now have more forest than ever before. We’ve introduced several initiatives to increase forest growth responsibly, including producing and improving seedlings and developing low-impact management methods and other measures such as nutrient recycling with bio-ash.
Responsible forest management means our members are increasing their growing stock, giving us access to a large supply of raw material. Annually, the trees in our forests absorb and store 2.4 million tonnes of CO2 while the substitution effect of renewable wood-based products used to replace those with higher climate impact equates to 8.2 million tonnes of CO2. Taking greenhouse gas emissions in our supply chain into account, Södra’s total climate effect is a net removal of 10 million tonnes of CO2 for 2020.
Sustainable business development is a key element of Södra’s Group strategy and we are focused on six areas, from climate-positive operations and sustainable forestry to resource efficiency and sustainable innovation. Three of our sustainability targets have equal status to our financial targets.
We continue to make progress with plans to be fossil fuel free across all operations by 2030; our production processes are already almost fossil fuel free and mostly powered by biofuels. Through various partnerships, we are working actively to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from freight transport by, for example, using rail freight instead of road haulage, and to stimulate technological advances.
Our resource efficiency targets mean that by 2025, our electricity and heating consumption will have declined at least 10 percent compared with 2015. We’ll be generating more electricity than we consume. Water supply and consumption is a key issue and will receive a greater focus moving forward. To optimise the efficiency of our water consumption, our pulp mills use a range of water-conservation measures. We also save water by using efficient irrigation systems that adjust the amount of water to the evaporation rate. Södra acquired the Karlshammar power plant to gain better control of the water flow to the pulp mill at Mönsterås and a new fish passage past the power plant now makes it easier for fish to swim both upstream and downstream in the Emån River.
Small measures like the one above, combined with our wider, ambitious targets to minimise our environmental footprint, all add up. In short, our commitment to a sustainable business model will only get stronger.
Read more about our environmental strategy and performance in the 2020 Annual and Sustainability Report.
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Subjects: Pulp
