Sustainability report

CEO’s message

We believe our role, as a business, is to offer our customers products that make a positive contribution to their own sustainability performance, while achieving improvements in our own. This ambition is at the heart of everything we do, from our management of resources to our membership of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, to our investment in new environmentally-friendly products. As the world’s population rises and concentrates increasingly in cities, we see significant opportunities to contribute to a more sustainable future. We can do this by developing products that help the world save resources, and make everyday life easier, healthier, and greener, from air filters, to components for wind turbines, to specialized medical fabrics. Our recent acquisition of 49 percent of Porous Power Technologies, a US company developing separators to lithium batteries used in electric cars, is another excellent example.

Unlike many companies of our size, we already use a significant proportion of renewable raw materials – 87 percent in 2011 – and this continues to rise as we apply our expert knowledge to make more and more products from renewable fibers. Our challenges as a business relate to the fact that ours is a resource-intensive industry, and those resources are becoming scarcer, and competition for them more intense. Our response is to become more efficient in our use of those resources every year, and to continually look for new ways to consume less energy, use less water, and produce less waste – and help our customers do the same. We have important initiatives underway in all of these areas, including a plan to reduce our waste to landfill to zero by 2015. There are more details on all of these initiatives later in this report.

In other ways we are similar to all other major businesses across the world, as we face the challenges of difficult economic conditions, volatile and rising commodity prices, changes in environmental regulation, and the risks as well as the opportunities of expanding our business into emerging markets. I am confident that we will address these issues – as well as the specific challenges of sustainability – in the same spirit that Ahlstrom has demonstrated since it was founded in 1851. We have always been a responsible company, and one that has adapted successfully to change, and these principles are made explicit both in our updated Code of Conduct, which we launched this year, and in our values, which are Acting responsibly, Creating value, and Learning and renewing. These values have helped Ahlstrom become the internationally successful company it is today, and they will help us meet the sustainability challenges of tomorrow.

Jan Lång
President and CEO