Environment

Environmental efforts contribute to long-term sustainable development of business operations. Swedish Match works to reduce the negative burden on the environment by continuously improving manufacturing processes in our operations. Thus creating sustainable conditions for our businesses, employees, and society at large.

The production processes and raw materials used in the tobacco industry generally have limited environmental impact. Approximately 80 percent of the raw materials used within the Group are renewable, and environmentally harmful substances are only handled to a limited extent during production. Swedish Match believes that its water and energy consumption, together with business travel and freight transport, constitute the greatest environmental impact.

Swedish Match works continually to achieve improvements in operations that have an environmental impact. In order to increase resource efficiency, the Group continuously fine-tunes its systems for cleaning and reducing emissions. Business trips effect the environment and to reduce travel, modern means of communications such as web-, and teleconferences are encouraged. As of 2010, all Swedish Match Annual and Interim reports are printed on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, carrying the FSC© logo.

The philosophy of Swedish Match is that environmental efforts should be carried out locally and that targets should be formulated based on identified environmental impacts. These targets should be clear, measurable and consistent with Swedish Match Environmental Policy. The targets also address compliance with regulations and other commitments. They address areas such as CO2 emissions, fuel and energy, discharges to water, and factory waste. In recent years, Swedish Match has reduced the water and energy consumption as well as the waste production.

Swedish Match welcomes the development of increased environmental awareness and sees it as an incentive for the Group to continuously improve measurements and find new ways to reduce its environmental Environmental efforts contribute to long-term sustainable development of business operations. Swedish Match works to reduce the negative burden on the environment by continuously improving manufacturing processes in our operations. Thus creating sustainable conditions for our businesses, employees, and society at large. impact. These measurements provide a common platform to evaluate environmental performance against that of other companies. One comparison project in which Swedish Match is participating is the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which maps companies’ CO2 emissions.

Table data
Emissions of carbondioxide (CO₂)¹⁾	2008	2007	2006	2005
Total tons CO₂	74,734²⁾	74,388²⁾	78,161	73,927
	78,985³⁾
Tons CO₂ per employee	6.3²⁾	6.2²⁾	6.3	5.2
	6.7³⁾
Tons CO₂ per MSEK sales	5.7²⁾	5.9²⁾	6.1	5.6
	6.0³⁾

1) Source: Swedish Match, latest available data.
2) Business travels only.
3) Business travels including purchased transports.

In 2009, Swedish Match initiated a project to conduct an inventory of the Key Performance Indexes (KPIs) used in the organization today. The aim is to find common KPIs to facilitate continual improvement and follow up of the environmental work.