Swedish rolled aluminium firm Gränges AB announced yesterday an initiative to achieve benchmarks for sustainable production and global competitiveness along the entirety of its value chain.
The firm’s press release described a set of five sustainability targets that Gränges expects to meet by 2025, consisting of a reduction in accidents per million hours worked to an average of 3.0, reduction of direct and indirect carbon emissions by 25 percent from 2017 levels, a 100-percent participation rate in training on Gränges Code of Conduct, ensuring that the entirety of the purchase value from significant suppliers comply with Gränges’ Supplier Code of Conduct, and increasing the number of women represented in the firm’s senior management to at least 30 percent.
Gränges’ CEO Johan Menckel explained that the initiative intends to bolster not only the company’s sustainability, but also will help it make strides on the financial front as well.
“How we plan and run our business today has a profound impact on the future. We must continuously challenge ourselves to develop sustainable offerings that create tangible business and sustainability benefits for our customers. Through the light-weighting properties and the recyclability of aluminium, our products promote a circular approach and enable customers and end-users to achieve significant savings in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The goals also make sense from a business point of view as sustainability measures can increase our financial top and bottom-line. Gränges’ new long-term targets demonstrate our commitment to sustainability and our strong focus on integrating sustainability into everything we do.”
Begun in 1873 in Stockholm, Sweden as Trafik AB Grängesberg-Oxelösund, Gränges AB was resurrected in 2013 as a private company specializing in rolled aluminium heat exchangers. It employs almost 1,000 employees at the present time at two plants – one in Finspång, Sweden, that opened in its present configuration in 1972, and a second in Shanghai, China, opened in 1996. The firm boasts an annual sales total of SEK10 billion (US$1.09 billion).