How Consumer Behavior Challenges the Circular Economy

Many small steps add up to large ones. That’s a simple way to sum up Iggesund Paperboard’s environmental work. It is easy to give examples of Iggesund’s multi-million euro investments and their importance. But the company also makes many smaller investment decisions which have important environmental aspects. One of these is the wooden bridge that links the mill at Iggesund with the wastewater purification facility on the adjacent island of Skälön. “Long-term environment work is less about making a few big decisions and more about making many small decisions which include the environmental aspects,” explains Anna Mårtensson, Environmental Manager at the company’s Swedish paperboard mill, Iggesund Mill. “In this case a wooden bridge was a better environmental choice than a concrete one.”

A new plastics sorting facility inaugurated in Sweden this week is being billed as the largest of its kind, and one designed to double the amount of plastic packaging materials being recycled in the Nordic country. Thanks to cutting-edge technology, the Site Zero plant in the central city of Motala can sort up to 200,000 tons of plastic packaging a year, according to Sweden Plastic Recycling, a nonprofit company co-owned by Swedish plastics, food and trade industry groups. The company says that’s more than any other sorting facility in the world. A unique feature of Site Zero is that it can separate up to 12 different types of plastic. An old plant at the same location could only sort five types of plastic, which meant that only 47% of the material was sent on for recycling and the rest was incinerated, said Mattias Philipsson, CEO of Sweden Plastic Recycling.

UPM has received recognition from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for its exemplary forest management practices. The recognition was conferred by the Forestry General Direction of Uruguay as part of a National Workshop titled “Methodological Transfer of Exemplary Cases of Sustainable Forest Management”. The acknowledgement followed a thorough investigation of various aspects of the company’s production chain conducted by a panel of experts from the INIA (Agribusiness Research Institute), the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of the Republic of Uruguay and the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences.