Strategy for steering environmental work within SCA

In SCA Personal Care the work started by a workshop when the central environmental group discussed and defined the environmental aspects of the product systems of the company. It was in this step avoided to take on environmental aspects that clearly are handled in a local EMS, i.e. it was focused on environmental management at group level.
The identified environmental aspects were then checked with a “grand” LCA, taking the total flows of all raw materials, energy used, emissions and product output into the LCA.

With this as a basic information and as a check on the correspondence between environmental policy and aspects, the next step was to extract and define indicators from the policy.

In the case of SCA Personal Care, the environmental policy is expressed in the document “Environmental Strategic Directions”. This policy can be considered to be a sub policy of the Sustainability policy of the SCA group. A working procedure was used, based on experiences from other projects^3,4,5: Firstly, the environmental policy and the most important stakeholders was identified. The system which is controlled by the policy (see Figure 1), was assessed with LCA. The possibilities to acquire data for the most important parameters was identified by investigating different sources of information like product specifications, report from factories, supplier data and outcome of LCAs. For the final selected list of indicators the definitions were reworked so that they can be easily understood.

Figure 1 A model showing how decision makers/environmental controllers can use environmental information to work towards a sustainable society Copyright © Raul Carlson, Chalmers University of Technology, 2002.

When working with the indicators, the following issues should be considered in order to get a useful set of indicators:

• What is the intended use of the indicator? For which decisions will it be used? Will it be used for comparisons and is it a fair comparison?
• Is the indicator dependent on or influenced by other indicators?
• Is the indicator relevant to other company functions (e.g. quality, procurement, safety)?
• Is there a connection to legal or other requirements? If necessary, explain the unit in which it is measured.
• Estimate the economic feasibility of the measurement of the indicator value.

Corresponding indicators have been defined for the statements in the strategy document and the aim has been to find indicators that can be defined down to the detailed level in where data actually can be found.

For a complete description of the working procedure, please see “Policy controlled environmental management work”.

³ Ander, A., Deflou, J., Dewulf, W., et al, Integrating Eco-efficiency in Rail Vehicle Design, Leuven University Press, 2001

⁴ Bergendorff, M. (Editor) et al, Final report for the EU funded REPID project, 2004

⁵ Carlson R., Erixon M., Erlandsson M., Flemström K., Häggström S., Pålsson A-C., Tivander J.; “Implementation of integrated environmental information systems”; CPM Report 2006:18

Experiences