People often think of sustainability as greener, eco-efficient actions, but we at Neles have revised our sustainability agenda for a more comprehensive approach. As the world around us is changing and global megatrends are putting pressure on more sustainable operations worldwide, our goal is to be the reliable partner offering sustainable solutions for our customers. We want to protect people, process performance and the planet by prioritizing sustainability in everything we do.
By closely following industry megatrends, we have identified three important drivers for building a more sustainable offering: growing demand for materials; safety, reliability and emissions of industrial processes; and growing levels of automation and digitalization.
While population growth is increasing the demand for consumer goods, the planet’s diminishing raw materials are forcing industrial manufacturers to produce more with less. Tighter legislation on environmental efficiency is putting safety and reliability matters, not to mention emissions, into the spotlight. It is becoming more and more important to focus on the reliable performance of processes with built-in eco-friendliness, energy efficiency, improved safety and productivity.
Neles’ sustainability agenda:
1. Health and safety
2. Environment
3. Society and people
This is where the growing levels of automation and digitalization can help to secure safety (through predictive maintenance breaks of the valve fleet), and also to improve process performance. By analyzing accurate process data, it is possible to make the right decisions at the right time to enable the plant to perform at its best, sustainably. So, productivity and sustainability go hand in hand.
Safety is everyone’s business
The health and safety of our employees, customers and partners is our top priority, and we are committed to zero harm for everyone. Our target is to build a solid safety culture where safety is embedded in everyday work life.
Safety goes beyond just doing our work safer. It is also about caring how easy and safe it is to install or service our equipment at the site. Therefore, product safety is always an integral part of our research and development (R&D) projects pursuing more sustainable offerings and solutions.
We drive safety through our HSEQ management system, audits, assessments and action plans for more consistency and improved quality of our operations. We provide thorough safety training for our employees, and we communicate about our safety principles as well as best practices on corrective actions. Safety becomes everyone’s business.
Eco-friendliness elevates business performance
At Neles, we care a lot about our environmental load and thus strive to continuously reduce water and energy consumption, emissions and waste in our own operations. Our aim is to achieve zero harm for the environment.
To protect our planet, we are committed to reducing our CO2 emissions by 20% in global logistics by 2025, and by 25% in our production by 2030. We will take our environmental efficiency also to non-production sites, where we will explore more opportunities to recycle, reuse materials and to use recycled, sustainable materials.
Our innovations for sustainability tap into the following areas:
- resource and raw material efficiency
- decreased energy consumption
- reduced risk of failure, leakages and fugitive emissions
We develop products that are recyclable, easily serviceable and last longer with less need for new wear or spare parts. With life-cycle services, we are able to prolong product life with the correct repair and maintenance or even upgrade existing components to provide better performance. With accurate process data and valve equipment performance monitoring services, we are able to optimize the customer’s process performance for lower energy consumption. With real-time valve condition monitoring, we can prevent sudden process failures and possible leakages or fugitive emissions, and aim for improved environmental efficiency. The eco-friendliness elevates process reliability.
Together for a brighter tomorrow
We at Neles are committed to responsibility in these areas of sustainability in our own operations and also in society at large. In all our actions we think of integrity and safety first, beyond what is mandated by laws and regulations. This is how we want to interact with our customers, employees and partners. We urge good corporate citizenship from all our stakeholders.
Our long-term target is that 90% of our suppliers in terms of spend have signed the Neles Supplier Code of Conduct by 2022. We also aim to have assessed 95% of our suppliers in higher risk areas by 2022. Consistent with our approach for environmental protection, we aim for 20% of our suppliers to have set emission targets by 2025.
We work closely with our suppliers, and we take responsibility for auditing and assessing their sustainability performance.
Being responsible makes us reliable.
Text originally published in 2020, and slightly updated in April 2022, due to the company name change to Valmet.
