What have you already done to reduce your GHG emissions?
Reducing Emissions, Driving Sustainability
At Safic-Alcan, we are dedicated to being a leading partner in the specialty chemicals industry, providing innovative solutions. Committed to excellence, sustainability, and customer satisfaction, we serve as the durable link between all stakeholders.
Sustainable development has been a key commitment for Safic-Alcan for several years now.
Our ESG strategy is made up of five pillars, emphasizing the role we play as a distributor to be the “durable link” between our partners, innovating responsibly together – in other words, integrating social and environmental responsibility into our work.
One of the pillars of our ESG strategy is to reduce the environmental value chain footprint. As such, in 2023, we implemented our Group Climate strategy, allowing us to contribute to the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the European Union (EU), by monitoring and reducing our greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions.
The EU Parliament is committed to achieving net zero emissions within Europe by 2050.
Net zero emissions are reached when the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is equal to the amount absorbed. There are currently two ways to achieve net zero emissions after reducing all possible emissions: carbon sinks and carbon offsetting. Carbon sinks are natural absorbers, such as the forests or oceans. However, they are not sufficient to absorb the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. This is why carbon offsetting is also needed. Carbon offsetting means compensating for its emissions by investing in projects that reduce or avoid carbon emissions.
While our climate strategy is deployed globally, each entity of the Group contributes to it by launching local actions. Safic-Alcan Nordic focuses on emissions from the transports of products.
In 2022, the total release of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) from light and heavy trucks was about 4.13 million tons in Sweden alone. Since trucks are a big part of the transport used to and from its warehouse in Sweden, Safic-Alcan Nordic aims to minimize the effects of these transports on the environment as much as possible.
Veena Lindén, the Quality and Sustainability Coordinator of Safic-Alcan Nordic, explains further what this means for Safic-Alcan Nordic.
We have started to work on our GHG emissions for Scope 1 (direct emissions) and Scope 2 (indirect emissions from electricity).
While our office building in Sweden is equipped with solar panels, we are switching our company car fleet to alternative solutions. It started a few years ago when we first changed from diesel cars to hybrids. Today, about 40% of our company cars are hybrids, and the rest are electric cars. The next step we are working towards, and which we hope to achieve very soon, is to have a fleet of 100% electric company cars.
However, as a distributor, our main emission sources remain Scope 3. While product emissions will be part of a dedicated Group reduction program, we are working on reducing transport emissions locally.
Indeed, Safic-Alcan is always targeting the optimization of our transport flows. It started with the implementation of hubs in Europe that consolidate several different products. In this way, we can collect products from several suppliers in the same place, which means fewer transports.
On the other hand, we always try to consolidate as much material as possible per shipment. We also ask our suppliers and warehouse to load on as few pallets as possible and optimize square meters per pallet.
To move forward on the reduction of our transport impact, Safic-Alcan Nordic want to offer carbon offsetting for transports to our customers.
What does it mean that Safic-Alcan Nordic offers carbon offset solutions for transports within Sweden?
Long-distance route alternative solutions are not always available for our transports, so while waiting for more options, Safic-Alcan Nordic decided to start with carbon offset solutions in Sweden. We are currently looking at options to offer this in all the Nordic countries.
To contribute to our sustainability goals, we have decided to reinforce our collaboration with our transport partner in Sweden by requiring that all transports within Sweden must be climate-compensated.
To achieve this, the transport partner collaborates with Atmosfair, a global actor that promotes and develops carbon offset projects that are Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)-rated.
For a project to be classified as CDM, it must contribute to reducing emissions that would not have been implemented without investment from the CDM mechanism. This means that we have included in our contract with our partner that all transports related to Safic-Alcan Nordic are to be net zero emissions, and the money paid for this add-on goes to various certified Atmosfair projects to offset carbon emissions.
The amount of carbon dioxide that is released from a truck could be saved through changing the energy used in a village in Africa from oil power to solar panels or making it possible for households in developing countries to use a biogas plant instead of firewood to decrease deforestation.
Are there any difficulties with switching to less emitted transports?
The logistics context has been quite complex since the COVID crisis. Even though we are doing our utmost to select transport partners aligned with our objectives, the economic reality means that not all solutions are always adapted to our needs. In such cases, we choose the compensation solution.
This is just the beginning of our contribution. We hope that in the future, more and more transport partners will favor low-emission transport options, allowing us to offer completely fossil-free transport.
If you want to know more about our Group ESG strategies and actions, visit our website.
