Product Stewardship implementation

It is vital to involve top management as well as the department managers in order to get resources for the PS activities and the best way to do this, in our view, is to incorporate the PS process into an existing management system. Since the management system is regularly reviewed, the PS activities will always be on the agenda.

It is also important to let as many employees as possible be involved in the PS activities and to have a person (PS manager) who has the overview and who can make priorities among the activities in order to achieve the most environmental benefit from the PS work. Having the employees involved in working with environmental issues and also in attaining the goals of the company will raise their job satisfaction and bring better overall quality to the company.

Work that have sprung from some other activity or decision may have a positive environmental effect and can be worked with and presented within the framework of PS, e.g. development of more energy efficient processes or decreasing the water content of a product.

The time needed for this implementation depends largely on the level of ambition. The time required by the PS manager(s) to accomplish all of the steps in the working procedure of this strategy was about 60 to 80 man-days during about one year.

Business value
The business value of implementing Product Stewardship is for example that it clarifies what is done and what is not done within the company. People in the whole organization not only the top management, is involved in managing the health, safety and environmental aspects of products. 

Furthermore, visualization of the health, safety and environmental aspects of products lead to improvements, if targets are set and actions taken. By implementing product stewardship, weak areas that otherwise might be forgotten are found. 

Product stewardship is a way to show stakeholders how we are working with these questions and the progress achieved.