Sweden’s Gränges AB announced yesterday that it will adopt and implement the United Nations Global Compact.
The UN Global Compact is a principle-based framework for businesses intended to encourage businesses to adopt policies that are both sustainable and socially responsible. The compact states ten principles in the areas of human rights, labor, the environment, and anti-corruption.
“We are proud to become members of the UN Global Compact. Sustainability is part of Gränges’ business strategy, and this is a way for us to show that Gränges takes sustainability issues seriously. We’re now taking the next step in our work to develop long-term sustainable operations,” said Gränges CEO Johan Menckel.
Announced by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1999, the compact is the world’s largest such agreement, with 13,000 corporate participants across 170 countries. The compact was launched in 2000 and is administered from the UN’s Global Compact Office.
The compact is not a regulatory instrument. It is instead a forum for discussion and a network for communications among governments, companies, and labor organizations. The compact does not certify companies as to their compliance with the principles. Rather, it intends to provide such companies with resources for meeting those principles.
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. Now the world’s largest manufacturer of rolled aluminium for aluminium heat exchangers, the firm boasts that one out of every two automobiles produced in the world at present includes parts manufactured by their firm. 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 SEK5.5 billion.