UPM gets sustainability award in the US

GreenPrint

UPM’s ‘Zero Solid Waste to Landfill’ initiative has received the Gold Award in the Midwest Region Sustainability competition challenged by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) Chicago. According to the panel of judges, UPM’s initiative stands out as an excellent example highlighting supply managers' responsibility to lead, drive and influence sustainability initiatives within an organisation.

UPM's Zero Solid Waste to Landfill initiative, launched in 2016, is one of the ways in which the company contributes to the United Nations sustainable development goals for the year 2030. The initiative focuses on five of the most challenging production side streams to recycle, starting in UPM's home country, Finland. The waste fractions are ash, sludge, sandy bark, dregs and mixed waste. The project's main goal is creating a permanent and scalable operational model around the existing forms of recycling and reuse of these challenging side streams, but it also looks into finding completely new, innovative ways to recycle and reuse the solid waste that has previously ended up in landfills. At UPM approximately 90% of production waste is already today recycled or reused. Before initiating this project, UPM already had zero solid waste to landfill operations at its mills in Austria and Germany.

‘UPM achieved both waste and cost savings from the Zero Solid Waste to Landfill efforts, showing how significant progress can be made to simultaneously reduce cost and support sustainable initiatives,’ said Scott Daniels, ISM Chicago Sustainability chair.

A million tonnes of UPM paper is used in the United States annually. The company has a paper mill in Minnesota and 700,000 tonnes of UPM paper is delivered every year from Europe.