with a heart for

Sustainability

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MED HJÄRTA FÖR

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THIS IS

HOW WE APPROACH

SUSTAINABILITY

With sustainability at the heart of our business, we naturally want to tell you how we work with it. We know we’re not the best, but we believe that we step by step can make a difference. Our ambition is to constantly improve and develop. We have categorized our sustainability work into six different areas to describe our approach.

CHOICHE OF MATERALS

WASTE

SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

ENERGY

CERTIFICATION

CIRCULAR ECONOMY

CHOICHE OF MATERIALS

Fundamentally, our raw material, carton board, is a renewable material. The carton comes from the forest and can be recycled or composted. Nevertheless, the production of carton board has a negative impact on the environment. To minimize our impact, we set high environmental and quality standards for the raw material we use. To be sure of the origin of the material, we work as much as possible with Nordic paper mills that are committed to sustainable development. In this way, we know that the materials we use comply with Swedish environmental laws and regulations and that they benefit our domestic forest industry. Buying Swedish carton board also minimizes the shipping we have for our raw material.

We can offer our customers FSC-labelled cardboard. FCS stands for Forest Stewardship Council and is an independent international membership organization that promotes the environmentally friendly, socially responsible, and economically viable use of the world’s forests and the raw materials from which they are derived.

For the printing inks we use, we have had a substitution program for several years where we gradually switched out our line to food-grade inks with less environmental impact. This has been done without compromising our quality.

ENERGY

Our business depends on energy. That’s why we work on both the type of energy we buy and how we use it. The energy we buy, and use is renewable energy from our local supplier Umeå Energi. To reduce our consumption, we are taking several measures. We have LED lighting in all our spaces with automatic switch-off. We have energy efficient ventilation with heat exchangers on our premises. 

We have also invested in an energy-efficient humidification system. In addition to reducing energy consumption for humidification by about 30%, our production environment is also improved, regardless of the season and weather. Finally, we also try to work on our transport and business travel, choosing electric or hybrid cars over fossil fuel cars. By stocking packaging for our customers, we can reduce the number of production occasions and deliveries of raw materials. Finished products are also further optimized to not transport air. 

WASTE

When it comes to waste, the first step is to minimize errors in our production. We strive to avoid discards and unnecessary use of materials. When introducing new products, we have procedures to set up production with the minimum amount of material used. We can also pride ourselves on very few complaints, which we can only achieve if we maintain a high quality of our products. We have been working for a long time to minimize waste. We also get the most out of the raw materials we use through advanced construction planning. We also make continuous investments in new machinery and technology that further improve our products. Recent investments have focused on minimizing wasted materials and enabling us to recycle more of our raw materials into renewable raw materials.

Of course, we are also affiliated with FTI, the packaging and newspaper collection agency. We report the amounts of carton, corrugated and plastic we use to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. This means that our customers can rest assured that the sorting of our products is carried out in accordance with current Swedish law and industry guidelines.

CERTIFICATION

We are extremely careful about our environmental and quality responsibilities, which is why we have chosen to be certified in ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO 14001 (environment). Umpac’s vision is to create sustainable packaging that carries the value of our customers. To live up to this, these certifications are reassuring and important for both us and our customers

sOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

Social sustainability is about creating positive conditions that benefit people and promote an equitable society. We stand for human rights, respect for labor laws, environmental protection, and social responsibility. We strive for diversity in our workplace where everyone can feel that they belong at Umpac. Our employees are the most important thing we have, so an extra commitment to good working conditions and satisfaction comes naturally to us.

To take responsibility for the entire value chain, we always try to choose suppliers with the same values and approach as us. We also try to influence our suppliers to do likewise. We already have a high standard but are constantly striving for further improvement.

CIRCULAR ECONOMY

A circular economy is the opposite of the linear economy and implies an attempt to use resources for as long as possible and then reuse and recycle them instead of throwing them away. For us, a circular economy is important, and we are constantly working to try and make our business more circular. The work with circular economy starts for us already at the design phase of a packaging where we optimize the packaging to use as little material as possible. This is a way to make sure that it is efficient to produce in our production so that waste from production is minimized. Moreover, our main raw material, carton, is a material that can be recycled many times over.

Our ambition is to constantly improve and in 2022/2023 Umpac is participating in the CEBANS program where we will start working towards a circular business model.

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